Cite Wikipedia?
Trevor Burnham is a student at my alma mater, Carleton College. He was the primary actor in the founding of CarlWiki, a Wikipedia-like site about the college. Recently in his blog, Burnham offered some good thoughts about Wikipedia.Educators need to pay attention to Wikipedia and learn about its assets and liabilities. They need to teach their students about the appropriate academic uses of Wikipedia. Burnham's thoughts are a good start:
Wikipedia and the price of free information
"In December of 2005, the journal Nature published a survey of forty-two science articles, comparing the factual accuracy of the versions in Wikipedia and Britannica. The difference in errors between the two was insignificant, and the Wikipedia articles generally included all of the Britannica information and then some. Good for them. "The article led many in the academic world to take Wikipedia more seriously. The problem? Some find the study's methodology to be flawed; and referring to it as a 'study in the journal Nature' is something of a misnomer: It was an informal survey printed as a non-peer-reviewed news piece.
"But perhaps most importantly, we're talking about the science 'sector' of Wikipedia, where the facts are clear and rarely change. Extending that evidence of accuracy to, say, articles on politics and current events is absurd. Very different people edit those entries, and for very different reasons.
"The truth is... you should never, ever use Wikipedia as a cited source... It was never the intent of Wikipedia's founders to make professional researchers and fact-checkers obsolete.
"When I pay to read a quality opinion piece printed in a magazine or newspaper, I demand that the facts in it be thoroughly investigated. However, Wikipedia is a great starting point for virtually any research.
"Increasingly, facts on Wikipedia are linked to credible sources on other sites (current events stories, for instance, are flooded with links to newspaper articles, allowing facts to be verified in a single click)...
"For too long, we have lived in a society that is superstitious in its epistemological beliefs. We still have the idea, somehow, that 'if it's printed in a book, it must be true.'... Wikipedia's link-to-primary-sources-when-possible methodology is the wave of the future, as long as primary sources allow free online access. That's reliable—even more reliable than the print medium allows. Until that happens, and even after, I'm going to continue happily paying for opinion pieces by professional columnists who check their facts with reliable sources. I just hope they'll realize that it's not the source in and of itself that's important; it's the source's sources."
And I would add, our students need to be aware of similar benefits and liabilities to Wikipedia's other projects: Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Commons, Wikiquote, and Wikisource.
Labels: pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:52 AM
1 Comments:
Minutes after posting the entry above, I read in the New York Times an article with this headline, " A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source."
One of the main points Noam Cohen, the reporter, made reinforced Trevor Burnham's admonition, "The truth is... you should never, ever use Wikipedia as a cited source..." The article also seconds a suggestion I made back in November that students be assigned to create or critique and correct articles already on Wikipedia.
Here is an excerpt from the New York Times article:
"When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in 'no position to aid a revolution,' he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding...
"He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.
"Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice...
"At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not 'point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.'...
"Although Middlebury’s history department has banned Wikipedia in citations, it has not banned its use...
" Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, 'I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.'
"He continued: 'Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.'...
"In some colleges, it has become common for professors to assign students to create work that appears on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia's list of school and university projects, this spring the University of East Anglia in England and Oberlin College in Ohio will have students edit articles on topics being taught in courses on the Middle East and ancient Rome.
"In December 2005, a Columbia professor, Henry Smith, had the graduate students in his seminar create a Japanese bibliography project, posted on Wikipedia, to describe and analyze resources like libraries, reference books and newspapers. With 16 contributors, including the professor, the project comprises dozens of articles...
"In evaluations after the class, the students said that creating an encyclopedia taught them discipline in writing and put them in contact with experts who improved their work and whom, in some cases, they were later able to interview...
"Another Middlebury professor, Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said, 'I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.'..."
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