Casey wrote on his blog today about Middlebury College’s History Dept banning wikipedia from essays and exams. That’s tough. An all out band seems a bit much, but then again, I didn’t allow students to cite wikipedia for their essays when I taught at UMass. And honestly, I can’t think of anyone who allowed it in their class and UMass is a big school. Yet, most of us used it. The problem of course is that when I read it I know to take everything with a grain of salt and verify things, but many students don’t. It is important to teach students how to verify and discriminate inaccuracies between sources, but that is only part of the battle if you want to get wikipedia into classrooms.
One problem I think some educators might have is the lack of accountability. A community edited encyclopedia is great for a lot of reasons, but when something is wrong there is no one to hold accountable. There is no one to pull aside and say “fix this.” While it is easy to go and fix it on your own, it is just as easy for someone to come along and unfix it.
To me the most interesting problem was that the site is dynamic. While there is a “history” of each entry there is no easy way to cite which specific version of the entry a person is using. Again, this is an issue related to accountability— for every citation a person should be able to see the source exactly as cited. This should be important both for the person reading and the person writing anything that cites wikipedia.
I told my students that they were welcome to use wikipedia for background, but that they should verify just about everything there through other verifiable sources and use those secondary sources in their papers. I remember one student telling me how he was surprised to find some inconsistencies in a Larry Bird article. I wasn’t surprised. What’s more, look at the history of the Larry Bird article, there have been more than five-hundred updates since June 2006. How would I ever find out today which version of the article my student was looking at back then? Wikipedia is getting better, but it is still a ways away from being a reliable source for educators.
