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How to use Wikipedia?

How can teachers teach the proper use of wikipedia? (Please read details before answering)?

  • A question I answered recently in the Biology forum, asked "How many genomes have been sequenced?" http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091113085721AAv9bXE I found lots of excellent genome databases and scientific papers ... but nothing answered this *general* question about "how many?" as well as the three wikipedia pages that provided convenient *lists* of genomes. The Asker thanked me for my Answer (the only Answer he got), but then concluded "... unfortunately, wikipedia's not a reliable source." I can only attribute this to the teacher's admonishment that wikipedia is not acceptable in a classroom as a source. That's fair enough ... NO encyclopedia should be acceptable as a *primary source*. But kids are getting the wrong message! 1. They conclude that wikipedia is "unreliable". This is unfair. It is no more "unreliable" than any other encyclopedia ... and one would be hard-pressed to find any fact on a page that is inaccurate. 2. It shuts kids off from a valuable resource. Reading up the *general* concepts of any topic on wiki, and then using its References and External Links to confirm facts and delve deeper is a perfectly valid way of exploring a topic. The alternative is to google your way into the wild west of the Internet, where the kid has no context in which to judge reliable-but-understandable sources, from the mountains of utter rubbish that exist on the Internet. My point: Kids have to be taught good research skills. Part of that is learning not to *rely* on wikipedia as your *only* source, but as one source among many. One should take *EVERYTHING* one reads on the Internet as "unreliable", not just wikipedia. So my question: How do teacher teach the proper use of the Internet in general, and wikipedia specifically?

  • Answer:

    I do a lot of copy-editing on Wiki sites, and I am sufficiently well-educated in certain areas to recognize when a Wiki article is good and when it is bad. Even if an article does not fall into one of my areas of academic expertise, I can identify by a good article by quality of writing, depth of detail, and the nature of the references provided. These let me know whether the article is likely to be reliable. The problem is that my ability to recognize this was developed over long years of traditional study, of reading serious, scholarly books and professional journal articles, in my pursuit of a PhD and an academic career. I can, for example, look at a list of references and citations on a Wiki site and tell whether they are the types of references that a scholar would consider valid and significant. Young students today are not coming to online sites with that kind of experience, and it is difficult to "teach" it; you have to acquire it over time. I'm noting here in Yahoo!Answers that students are often not reading books -- they're convinced that they can find all the summaries and information they need online, and that's a real problem. Unless they do a great deal of reading in published material that has been vetted by editors and other scholars, they will not acquire the tools to judge the quality of a Wiki site or any other site, for that matter. But Wikis are good for basic factual material, such as the lists you describe, and students should be told that such lists can be very useful. At the same time, they should be told to be skeptical of subjective opinion on Wiki sites and to compare it with other sites and with the material found in books and articles. When I answer questions here, I often provide a reference site -- sometimes it's a Wiki and sometimes not -- but I frequently say, "There are many books on this subject. Go read them." In fact, a good classroom exercise, one teachers should be assigning these days, would be a comparison of Wiki and other sites with books on the same topic. It would help develop a student's capacity for critical and anaytical thinking while recognizing the increased importance and value of online research. I would urge teachers to assign such projects starting when students are about 10 or 11, making them increasingly more complex as students mature, while also making sure that they are still reading, reading, reading in published books and journals.

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Wikipedia is here to stay, so you are right in thinking that people really need to learn how to use it properly. The main thing teachers can do is to teach their students how wikipedia articles are written and who contributers can be. The next thing is to show how to look for attributions in the article (are sources listed or is this off the top of someone's head). Teach how to follow up these sources. How to find if there are challenges listed to the article's accuracy and what this means. These are critical reseach skills that all students need to apply to ALL their sources, anyway. Wikipedia actually makes it easier to look for these things than almost any other source. I have found Wikipedia to be a great starting off point for research into a topic, but never the final say. Same as with the encyclopedias I used back before the WWW. Get a general overview of a topic and figure out where to look next. I work in the biotech field and on one project looking for safety data on hundreds of marketed drugs we found widipedia to be the best place to start. It had certain factual information we needed on just about every drug (molecular weight, solubility, clinical indications, FDA warnings) and most importantly, it had links to many other databases and scientific literature where we could dig for more information.

Information Police

as good as wikipedia can be these articles are unreliable(1) sources due to the ability to "easily" edit (vandalize) articles(2). if i were an impressionable (read: lazy) student, i'm sure i wouldn't be able to recognize a factual article from one that has been vandalized. that being said, i do still enjoy edifying myself through random wiki articles as this is a good way to get quick lay information (however, the more scientific articles wax esoteric). and i think this is the point: wikipedia is for quick information and not for use as a reference source (for research papers). a teacher, who is not averse to internets researching, would have to teach students how to properly cite website sources (eg MLA(3), APA(4), Chicago(5)). a teacher wanting to teach the proper use of wikipedia should encourage its use as a "starting point" (but the wiki article would not be used as a source, as (how i view it) wiki articles are 'mini' research reports already)

Extra Ordinary

I can agree with your second and third points but not your first. Wiki is notoriously unreliable in many fields. It does have a slightly better reputation in the sciences, though. I will not pooh-pooh any source but the mechanism for Wikipedia leaves it vulnerable to a load of horse manure being dumped on the field. And I don't mean the well-composed manure either. To claim that it is no more "unreliable" than a real encyclopedia is absurd. I have some familiarity with the Encyclopedia Brittanica and suspect that other printed encyclopedias are somewhat similar. Articles are farmed out to experts in the field and pass through the hands of editors before seeing publication. Errors and opinions masquerading as fact are limited in this way. The value of Wikipedia is that it can post information quickly and that it can serve as a jumping-off place. That's as far as it goes. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that at least some of the citations in a report, even one by a young student, should be printed works that have been edited. Wiki fall in the same category as "My Uncle Louie told me ..." Uncle Louie might well be right but is not someone you want to cite in a report, unless he happens to be a recognized expert in the field.

oikos

>>I can only attribute this to the teacher's admonishment that wikipedia is not acceptable in a classroom as a source. I imagine many teachers make such a fuss about wikipedia. I'm not sure that's the problem though. If you remember, there have been several media attacks on wikipedia regarding a few inaccuracies (and a lawsuit as well). I hear many adults saying the same thing about wikipedia not being reliable, so I don't think it's only an issue in a classroom setting. Regarding your question, it looks like you already answered it. People need to be taught good research skills and the differences between primary and secondary sources of information. In the case of that particular question you answered... you have to be careful before jumping to conclusions about his/her views on sources of information. I don't see the comment as being anti-wiki. The questioner probably did not want a secondary source of information, which is less reliable than a primary source. That doesn't mean he/she is anti-wiki though. EDIT: are you serious???? you're reading a lot into that one little comment the questioner left. I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt that he wanted a primary source, and not a secondary one. I don't see it as bashing wiki... or being anti wiki. i definitely wouldn't go asking two questions about it. I read wiki all the time but i know it's not always reliable. am i anti-wiki for saying that???

Black Ache

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