Students ‘should use Wikipedia’ (BBC News)
Comments(4) “You can ban kids from listening to rock ‘n’ roll music, but they’re going to anyway,” he added. “It’s the same with information, and it’s a bad educator that bans their students from reading Wikipedia.”
In 2005, at the height of the controversy over the site’s accuracy, Mr Wales told the BBC that students who copied information from Wikipedia “deserved to get an F grade”. –Alistair Coleman
[Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s take on citing Wikipedia now and then. An important distinction is made here in that college attempts teaching students how to conduct research in an academic environment toward producing a new or overlooked argument. The constantly changing accuracy or possibility of inaccuracy robs students from finding niches and innovating older ideas. I continue banning my students from citing Wikipedia and I know I am NOT a bad educator. BK]
category: Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology
I’m with you Bobby. Wikipedia is not OK in my classroom either. As far as I’m concerned, Wikipedia is sheer laziness…and certainly not scholarly.
Rather than “banning” Wikipedia and other similar sites, I do a lesson with my students helping them understand why using Wikipedia will make for a weaker argument, as compared to using other more scholarly sources. Just preventing students from using the site without explanation doesn’t help. And I wouldn’t call Wikipedia “lazy” either–as I do recommend my students skim the site to figure out where to begin in their research. I always find it’s a good place to start, and have rarely been led astray by it. This kind of labeling of the site does us and our students a disservice.
I preface my ban with showing them “Editing He-Man” from Penny Arcade and holding a similar discussion about why Wikipedia is unacceptable as a scholarly source.
OK, I’d like to clarify my comment:
Not going *beyond* Wikipedia for research is sheer laziness. I, too, tell my students it’s a good place to start so they can get a sense of their topic, and possibly even find some good sources. I *do* believe, though, that simply Googling or defaulting to Wikipedia and not doing any further research *is* lazy and not at all scholarly. 🙂