To be or not to be–Wikipedia as a source?
Oct 9th, 2009 by Cathy Jo Nelson
I saw this today over at New Trier Library. Take a moment to enjoy.
How many have observed teachers or teacher librarians who don’t know what Wikipedia is, and therefore allow use as a valid source for research? Is that good practice?
How many have heard teachers or teacher librarians malign Wikipedia, claiming it is unreliable and should not be cited as a source? Is that good practice?
How many teach Wikipedia at all? Should we?
Did you know for basic searches of historical people, like say Abraham Lincoln, Wikipedia is generally in the first few hits returned in the millions of sites available?
Let’s look at this example: Abraham Lincoln
- Google lists its number one hit tonight out of 11.5 million+as the article from Wikipedia
- Searching Bing, Abe’s Wikipedia article was second only to images found out of 18.7million+ hits
- In Yahoo, amongst 35.2 million hits, Abe was second, again only image results
- And finally, Ask lists Wikipedia 9th in the returned links 1.74 Million+ hits (I have recently discovered a growing number of students who like Ask.com, and I have a theory on why, but that’s a later post.
Considering the sales pitch we are giving to get students to use our library databases, even making them appealing with crazy widgets and what nots, students still just can’t resist the pull to their favorite search engines.
But notice how high Wikipedia falls in the above search results. How many educators, parents, or students know what Wikipedia is?
Some facts about Wikipedia–food for thought:
- User contributed content–anyone can create an account and contribute. Consider this: Wikipedia has a policy that requires its contributors to cite verifiable online sources for the items they are writing. While enforcement of this rule for more obscure topics on the site can sometimes be lax, the more popular articles usually have citations. One useful way to use Wikipedia is as a jumping point to other potentially more trustworthy resources, which appear as citations at the bottom of many Wikipedia entries.
- Disputed historical and political events are often influenced by the Wikipedia contributor’s ideology, even if done so unintentionally.
- Often, articles without citations (for example, articles that appear incomplete or that may not be neutral in their viewpoint) are labeled as such by a banner at the top of the page. This allows other editors to look for and pick up the slack, and for readers to be aware that the given article is unreliable. Just checkout this Wikipedia article on the medicinal use of marijuana.
- The debate surrounding Wikipedia also makes the site a good jumping off point for lessons about evaluating Web sites and information for reliability, and for lessons on critical reading.
- Wikipedia even tells users how to cite in MLA format (can you tell that is targeted toward k12 students?)
I say YES–TEACH WIKIPEDIA! Make your students, teachers, parents and entire student community look at this resource with a whole new perspective. Educate the masses. Isn’t that what we do? Instead of refusing this source, embrace it. Teach it. It’s a great example of using wikis–actually the ultimate example. There are many resources to help you teach it online. Just look at this one and this one.
Now if I could just figure out how to effectively teach how Google works. Or better, how “Ask” works. Sigh.
I completely agree! Why waste any resource–especially one that’s as free and awesome as Wikipedia.
Thanks for sharing this video – I’ll definitely be passing it along. What is funny is that I had a conversation about this very topic a couple of weeks ago with an English teacher and her English 2 honors students. The teacher told them not to use it and that it was a bad source. She then asked me to explain the site – expecting me to back her up. When I said it wasen’t a good or bad site, just one you need to evaluate the information & where it came from, she wasn’t happy. I explained how the articles were edited and about the edit history page. She relented enough to say they could use it as a starting point, but not to rely on the info they found there. What I’m surprised about is that it is no longer blocked by my district!