Are teachers and professors warming up to the usage Wikipedia?

When I was a teacher, I allowed Wikipedia. I am well aware of the no-Wiki dogma from many teachers and professors, can understand why, but for my high school students I allowed it as a starting point. Hell, I even use Wikipedia as my own starting point.

I also taught them how to check to see if a Wiki page was reliable or not (an important skill!) and required additional sources.

Warmed up? I’ve already moved from warm to hot in that area. I think strong investigative skills are still needed, but that these skills need to also come with the ability to filter what’s good information and what’s bad.

On one hand it is a great resource but it is not scholarly research. The information on Wikipedia maybe hearsay or opinions and is not primary source for information.

Resources are resources. No longer are we living in an era where one must walk 17 miles in the snow to the library with only one, sad little dog eared notebook and a dull pencil to do their research.

“I think in todays age, with the technology at hand, there won’t really be a need for strong investigative skills.”

In my opinion, this is exactly backwards. With so much information available at anyone’s fingertips, we need better investigative skills to be able to tell truth from misinformation.

Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, and we can argue its value at different levels of education, but the point is that students must be taught to think carefully about the sources of the information they use – what to trust, what not to trust. And what makes an acceptable source of information definitely changes depending on what level you are at, what subject you are writing about, and who your audience is.

@glacial I also went on to say, “I’m saying this loosely and not definitively.”

i.e. Yelp to find a decent reviewed store/restaurant, Google Maps to locate places, eBay & Amazon for price comparisons vs retail stores, things of that nature. I was referring to, “practical every day use investigative skills in the real world” type of deal.

I do agree though with a bunch of information it’s important for people to the distinguish the difference between heresay and hard nosed recorded resources.

Last semester I had a friend. A beautiful girl who I can tell grew up in a very controlled environment. She considered TGIF’s bar a real, “bar.” Anyways, she totally Wikipedia’d our art history research papers. She just wrote down informational structured sentences and voiced no opinion. She basically was plagiarizing the authors words. Our professor called students out as he noticed an occurring theme in the class. People were not citing sources of the original voice. All of a sudden, students became the masters of the said subjects! Haha. What’s scary is, she must’ve passed satisfactory because she got accepted into SDSU. I’m not claiming it’s a highly touted school, but it’s a University System none the less that offers Bachelors, Masters & Doctorate (sp?) programs

My daughter is a freshman in high school and taking World History. She was taught not to use it a few years ago, but her teacher uses it to help himself on course material and while making powerpoint slides. So it is okay in m daughter’s class.

Her high school is one of the top public high schools in the state. And Wikipedia has been found to be more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica, and updated more quickly. It’s fine to use.

Echoing @linguaphile here…

When I used to teach, I permitted it as a starting point, but not as a definitive source to be used in research papers. Research skills at the secondary and tertiary levels is rapidly becoming a lost art. I had college seniors that didn’t know how to write their way out of a paper bag, or how to define the difference between primary and secondary sources, let alone community-contributed “knowledge” forums such as Wikipedia.

I think a lot of it has to do with the shift from traditional libraries to the internet; while the internet is a great tool and a vast source of information, I think youth aren’t honing their skills by citing encyclopedias and other written reference materials, and then working their way up from there, as they did when I was their age. Do they even have library skills modules in junior and high schools anymore? Anyone know?

@AngryWhiteMale I graduated almost ten years ago, and even then no one in my Floridian schools knew how to use an encyclopaedia or a card catalog. We used them all the time in New York.

I did have one teacher that allowed only one Internet source per research paper, and we had to find other sources. You could use the Internet to figure out which book to read or whatever, but the information itself had to be non-Internet based. Once, I was able to use an email conversation with the author of the book I had planned on using as a source. That’s something you can’t get from Wikipedia. Sometimes making the effort to dig deeper is totally worth it.

@linguaphile How can you check if a wiki page is reliable? I am currently studying and have found some interesting points on Wiki have not felt comfortable using them in case I am marked down for it.

When I studied Sociology some years back, my teacher did not advocate the use of Wikipedia stating that in her opinion it was still (and I do quote), “largely unreliable”, favoring good ol’ fashioned research in a library to sitting in front of a wiki page.
If I were to be a teacher I think it would be okay, but I would advise students to cross reference books specifically written on a topic covered in order to ensure that mistakes were less likely to be made in writing up what they’ve been researching. It would be bad form for any student to rely heavily on one source alone for something like coursework material.