Is Wikipedia wicked or wonderful?
When Wikipedia was first launched, librarians and teachers were adamant that it should never be used as a valid and authoritative reference source. As time has passed, however, some educators have come to believe that Wikipedia has a place in teaching information literacy and critical thinking.
Scott McLeod’s post on his Dangerously Irrelevant blog gives some good reasons why we should be using Wikipedia with students and why we should talk about its use with our administrators. It’s worth the read.
Where do you stand on the issue?
November 24th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I’ll admit to being a Wikipedia user. I’ve never failed to find an entry with good information concerning the few subjects I’ve looked up. I was interested to find that unsubstantiated information is accompanied by a note that a resource is needed. I love having words and names in the articles linked to other articles. I was shocked when I first saw statistics about mistakes in print encyclopedias compared to Wikipedia. I tell students to check important information using an additional source, but from what I’ve seen, I think this tool is wonderful. It’s certainly priced right!
November 25th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I find his stance on Wikipedia use quite different from that of Jamie McKenzie. At his workshop last month, he gave us many examples of misinformation that he found on Wikipedia. According to Michael J. Petrilli’s article in Education Next entitled “Wikipedia or wickedpedia”, he states that Wikipedia can be a “decent starting place” for mainstream types of research. However, with so many excellent online databases, books, and other current resources, why would we rely heavily on a source that is considered to be usually reliable?
November 25th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
It seems that there are almost as many opinions about Wikipedia as there are people. Alan November touts using it as a place to publish student research. He advocates finding a topic that doesn’t have an entry and letting students research the topic and write the article.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Did Jamie McKenzie fix the mistakes he found? Because if he didn’t, isn’t he sort of missing the whole point? Just curious…