Have you looked at Wikipedia lately? Even if you’re not consciously looking for information on the Wikipedia website, the chances are that you come across with Wikipedia entries as you search anything on Google. It’s usually in one of the top five search results and whether you like it or not, it’s on our face all the time. That means, Wikipedia entries are the first thing your students read when they are looking for information online. If the students are new to academia or if you don’t have a course policy prohibiting them from citing a Wikipedia entry as a source, you may even see it in the students’ paper as one of the reference, or even worse, they may be cutting and pasting from Wikipedia entry.
Back in 2007 (yes, that’s only 4 years ago!), Middlebury College’s History department officially started placing a disclaimer on their syllabi about limiting the use of Wikipedia. This policy has fueled a big debate about the use of Wikipedia in Academia (see articles on Inside Higher Education and Chronicle about this debate). Some faculty have associated Wikipedia with inaccurate, low-quality writing and banned the use of Wikipedia altogether. At that time, I did not pay too much attention on this debate, but as I was writing this blog post, I reviewed the argument of this debate and realized that Middlebury College’s disclaimer was actually very sensible one. It basically stated that students should not cite Wikipedia as a source in any academic work. It did not necessarily discourage students from using as an entry point for further research. This has also been my recommendation to faculty on the use of Wikipedia for a long time.
Now in 2011, Wikipedia has come a long way in improving their quality and depth of work. Wikipedia, as a user-generated content, still has quite a bit of unevenness in quality but they have started using more experts’ input on many articles, classifying articles by their quality and enforcing various guidelines for article creation and editing. At the same time, they began working more closely with academic and non-profit organizations and started interesting initiative such as Public Policy Initiative and Wikipedia US Education Program. Wikipedia US Education program is a very interesting program, for which you can sign up your class and run a semester project creating and editing Wikipedia entries. By signing up for the program, Wikipedia will assign you campus and online ambassadors who can provide pedagogical support to the faculty and technical support to the students. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to attend Campus Ambassador training and I now believe that Wikipedia can be more than entry point for information when the students are engaged with the content. For example, Wikipedia emphasizes the two important concepts: “neutral point of view” and “verifiability.” All articles must be written (or at least intended to be written) from a “neutral point of view” and must present a variety of arguments in the article. So, let’s say that you’re writing on health effect of cell phones, you should try to write both positive and negative effects. All articles also must provide sources of information so anyone can verify the source, read the original information and decide if the information is valid (the concept of verifiability also helps students from plagiarizing).
If you’re interested in participating in Wikipedia US Education Program, you can find more information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:USEDU. Or if you just want to explore how Wikipedia can be used in your class, check out their Education outreach page at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/For_educators. I’m planning to do an event later in the fall semester about this with Dr. Shamira Gelbman from Politics and Government who is currently participating in the US Education Program (details to come, look for the event on our website in a few weeks). Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in exploring possibility of using Wikipedia in your classroom.
