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Professors To Ban Students From Citing Wikipedia
Inisheer writes "History professors at Middlebury College are tired of having all their students submit the same bad information on term papers. The culprit: Wikipedia — the user-created encyclopedia that's full of great stuff, and also full of inaccuracies. Now the the entire History department has voted to ban students from citing it as a resource. An outright ban was considered, but dropped because enforcement seemed impossible. Other professors at the school agree, but note that they're also enthusiastic contributors to Wikipedia. The article discusses the valuable role that Wikipedia can play, while also pointed out the need for critical and primary sources in college-level research." What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
I wonder how many of those professors had actually been misinformed. I've had a handful of professors state information that I found out later to be in disagreement with a larger community. Most of them don't like to be told or find out that they are wrong. On the other hand, I don't blame them for doing this. Wikipedia might be a good place for determining what books you could find good information in, but not as the reference itself.
With City Wikis like Bloomingpedia, a lot of the information is gathered from observation and personal research and there isn't much else to reference. I'm wondering how referencing then will pan out, if it ever needs to be done.
This seems consistent to me--when I was in college, citing any encyclopedias was strongly discouraged.
Students should use it as a starting point, and check the sources of a wikipedia entry, then, use those sources for their papers.
It's a great starting point, but you can't trust the information completely. Use it to get you aimed in the right direction and then go from there.
I'm tempted to plant some *really* wrong information on any given topic, when I become aware of a term paper that's been assigned on it.
You know, things like 'Bonito Mussolini was named after a kind of tuna fish. He was born in the year 1726 and died of natural causes 800 years later'.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
you can gain the knowledge you need, then use that knowledge to find appropriate resources for citation.
Mission accomplished.
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
From what I've seen, the whole point of being an academic historian is to promote a particular point of view (bias). At first, I thought that the Middlebury history department was objecting to wikipedia because it was "not accurate" (i.e. biased) which seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
On further reading, the objection seems to be that wikipedia is not a primary source. Encyclopedias should not, in general, be cited as references. Like other encyclopedias, wikipedia is not a place for primary research articles with well-defined methodology nor can not be cited as the opinion of a specific individual expert - being written somewhat anonymously by the general public.
What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
The same role as a library index cards (yes, I'm old, so shoot me), pointing students to resources for further evaluation. Doesn't anyone chase after citations anymore?
Encyclopedias are meant as guides to further, substantive reading, not end-sin-themselves. The last time I was permitted to rely on an encyclopedia's authority alone was in middle school (age 13).
IMHO, NO single source is trustworthy. Wikipedia is a source, but it shouldn't be used as THE source.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wikipiedia (or any encyclopedia) is a good STARTING place for information, however fom there you sohuld really look through the links that are cited in the article itself, see what you think of theri validity, and possibly cite them directly if that is where you info ends up coming from.
And remember, Wikis get vandalized, if you read somethign that SOUNDS acurate, it could just be a good trick that no one has caught yet.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Citing an encyclopedia was frowned upon back when I was in college. Wikipedia is like an encyclopedia but with an even worse feature, the information can change at any given time. I would not want to cite something and have a professor or his assistant look it up and see that it was different from what I wrote in the paper.
Why the hell are COLLEGE students citing encyclopedias in papers in the first place? That's what you do for those papers in sixth grade on why Tony Hawk is awesome or whatever, but if you're older than 14, you shouldn't be citing an encyclopedia (or *pedia) of any sort. That's just a sign of poor research skills.
Most well-written Wikipedia articles cite sources. These sources are usually authoritative in their own right. Students should use these.
Some pages, such as autobiographies or pages written by experts using first-hand information, may lack such sources. These may make good primary sources but the burden of proof is on the student to show why they are authoritative. If the primary author is a well-known authority that should be good enough for any professor.
Professors should encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia and submit the contributions for academic credit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
. . . I'm amazed Wikipedia isn't already covered under some sort of ban on citing any sort of encyclopedia in a term paper. I know when I was in college that wound never have flown with any of my professors. All it succeeds in showing is that you were too lazy to find some decent sources for your work. Citing Wikipedia is particularly egregious in that a decent Wikipedia article will cite sources (with those blue clicky things, no less), making it really easy to get to the good stuff.
Even if you do not approve Wikipedia itself, it's concept and success story is something the educational institutes should learn from.
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I teach argumentative writing to freshmen, and they aren't allowed to cite wikipedia for me either. In fact, unless someone is writing about wkipedia, I can't see any reason to use it as a bibliographic source in an academic paper. And I don't know anyone who would sanction wikipedia as an acceptable source.
In education? Everything. I've learned so much about topics I never had the means to easily research, or things I never knew existed. The amount of knowledge on Wikipedia is fascinating and a dream for someone who loves to learn. It can be a blessing for students.
In academics? It is obviously not suited for citing factual information, but it certainly helps students formulate and nurture ideas and theories. It can help point them in the right direction, and it can also lead them towards more factual sources.
A ban on citing Wikipedia is expected, but Wikipedia is far too powerful to dismiss as not having a role in education.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
internet cites are NOT permitted.
B-school is different. As an MBA (flame away!), internet cites are permitted...because most corporate information and research is available and ONLY available (in many cases) via the internet.
So, it's up to your professor or advisor if you can use internet cites.
Next question.
Wikipedia should never be cited as a source. It's a good way to start getting some information on a topic, but that's it. Do these professors allow students to use encyclopedias as sources? This isn't elementary school.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
I don't cite from Wikipedia, however i do use the sources and citations used from Wikipedia without mentioning the wiki article itself.
I know many of my peers that use it religiously, and many of those papers are practically clones. However, if my lecturers started to try and stop the use Wikipedia for material, I'll be the first to point out that little hypocritical rule. My lectures use Wikipedia abundantly in their hand-outs, notes and references to their own work when lecturing!
Honestly, how accurate (or inaccurate) is any online source?
There's an official MLA citation format for online sources and using online sources is commonly encouraged. The question is, is Wikipedia any more inaccurate than the multitudes of other sources online?
You mean the Everywhere Girl is not responsible for the German bombing of Pearl Harbor?
I feel disillusioned.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
An encyclopedia, regardless of type, is a poor replacement for a textbook. If you buy a book you rarely open, then you should be 1) studying harder, or 2) not buying your books until the 3rd week of class when you're sure you need them. ;)
I don't recall ever being allowed to cite from any encyclopedia because it was itself a summary of done by someone else. And a reference was only considered "good" if it was from a seminal source. Wiki is a good start to track down information (like most any encyclopedia) but stopping there is laziness.
Wikipedia is certainly a good place to get ideas for sources, but a source itself? It may have changed by the time you submit your paper! How do you even accurately cite it?
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And when all I'm interested in is a general overview of something, it's often a good place to go. But I agree that using it as a source for a college paper is unwise. Not just because of the innacuracies, but because when you are doing research, you need to get to original sources. Wikipedia by its very nature is not an original source.
One thing I impressive about Wikipedia is just how obsessively detailed some of the entries are. Some of those details may or may not be correct, but the level of detail is far greater than any encyclopedia I've ever used. And even a detail that's wrong or innacurate still gives you something to look for when you're going over original sources.
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I don't know about your universities, but at mine our professors always told us to never, ever cite from any form of encyclopedia...
Which Wikipedia falls under. So I don't see any problem in banning it, because it's bad practice anyhow.
The whole point of work at university level is to gain a deeper understanding which an encyclopedia isn't going to give - you'll only get an overview. You need to hit those journals and get as close to the primary sources as you can. Prove you understand the stuff by constructing your arguments from those sources.
Asking wiki is like asking a fact-hoarding know-it-all roommate; it might give you a direction to look, but you're not going to anchor a paper to his off-hand comment.
For any kind of college-level research, citing a wiki as important fact is a recipe for disaster; it's simply does not have the level of trust and depth that true academic sources require.
That doesn't undermine its importance as a starting point though, giving a rudimentary outline of a subject and some initial sources to follow up on. E.g., if I know nothing about the First Nations of Canada and how they've been affected by modernization, then looking at a wiki would be the first step, followed by extensive research to verify and find "real" information. It wouldn't be the last step.
Repeat after me:
"Encyclopedias are not a source."
Now repeat again after me:
"Encyclopedias ON THE INTERNET are not a source."
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
They shouldn't be using encyclopedias in this way at all. They are a good place to start your research and point you in the right direction, but you probably shouldn't actually be using them as a source in your writing...
What?
Wikipedia is a great starting point for any research, but it should never be cited in a university-level term paper (and the same applies to any encyclopedia, online or paper)! The best wikipedia articles link to the original sources for their information and a good researcher should always be using original sources.
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Wikipedia aspires to be an encylopaedia. From the front-page:
Welcome to Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
It's for background reading and finding primary and secondary sources. As such, this is how I use it.
Interesting that the profs contribute. Part of the reason why wikipedia is better than Brittanica.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Wikipedia is presently unsuitable for citation because citing means citing an author, not a web page (that can change, I might add). Even if the person doing the citing has the foresight to cite a deep link to a specific version of a page (i.e. "oldid" is encoded in the Wikipedia URL), Wikipedia does not offer a direct way to know who wrote what within the article. Wikipedia does not even guarantee the identity of contributors.
Remember, when explaining the usefulness of Wikipedia to your friends, just say "Wikipedia is the new Google."
I like that idea being tossed around by the school of outright banning Wikipedia -- might as well ban Google and the entire Internet and just stick to dead trees.
This sounds like a good way for thoes people who are tired of it being wrong to go fix it. Dont ban something you can edit!
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My gf is in her 4th year of Classical Studies and it is simply recognized that Wikipedia is not a citable source. Just like you shouldn't cite encyclopedias.
The department should not need to put a ban on Wikipedia citing. That's almost like recognizing that it may, in some way, be acceptable, but that this University won't allow it. Really, it's already recognized that citing primary sources is important and that citing an encyclopedia is unacceptable.
Now, if the Uni has a published ban on using certain reference types. Then I agree that they can add Wikipedia. However, if such a ban does not exist, then there's not point in creating one. Just tell students that Wikipedia is an unacceptable source along with many others.
Wikipedia is a great place to start your research, get in, get your feet wet, learn a general feel of the overall topical area, and give the student enough information to pursue subareas of interest. After all there are references at the end of most Wiki's to help out. But I would have to agree with the History professors that it should not be used as a sole reference.
I called it a mighty Sperm Whale, she called it Finding Nemo.
How can you say a piece of information is accurate? Only if you create it in first person and use it!
Othewise if you have the original source, you can accurately cite it. If you have not, you end to cite a source claiming to cite an original source. And so on.
In regards to the History, most of the sources either are not original or have a quesitonable genuinity.
Wikipedia is great as it doesn't claim to have accurate information and allows everyone to modify almost everything.
Just like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! (Sorry for the inaccurate infos!)
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Sciece students at university should be taught the value of citing reliable and verifiable sources. Wikipedia is an incerdible resource - whenever I want to find out more about a particular topic, I go straight to wikipedia to get an overview, and it can act as an excellent springboard towards more and better sources of information.
However, I can also understand the professor's attitudes - although they may contribute to wikipedia themselves, this does not assure the accuracy of every statement made there. Whilst wikipedia is making a valiant effort to cite all of its references and backup every point, it is clearly unrealistic to expect a collaborative encyclopedia to cite reliable sources for every statement made. Unfortunately, the sciences are extremely rigorous about making verifiable claims, and the collaborative nature or wikipedia automatically excludes it from this list. It should never be cited as a primary resource in a real world scientific paper.
The role wikipedia should play in education is... education, surprisingly! If I ever want to find out anything about any topic in the world (or even off-world!) my first stop is wikipedia. It is an incredible tool for giving oneself a rough education in any topic, but for an in depth education about said topic, wikipedia is not sufficient, and unfortunately, it is not reliable enough to count as a valid source in scientific papers.
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As someone who grades graduate level research papers, I've had to make comments on wikipedia citations before. Students who do cite wikipedia get a book from me in the margins. It is, as noted above, completely inappropriate to use any encyclopedia for reference. It isn't amazing to me that the school has made a statement against use of wikipedia but it is continually shocking that any student (including the one's I've graded) actually continues to use it.
Wikipedia was still new and not well known, I introduced numerous professors to it and I know many of them spend time editing articles about their subject matter to this day. I cited Wikipedia a few times for research papers. Never for anything vital, and typically only because what was written did a nice job of summarizing a major point and was backed up by good citations. Generally, I found Wikipedia incredibly helpful for first level research. You read the article(s) there on the subject you are researching, you read what the article(s) link to, then you dig through everything these articles cite. It's great for getting that first intro to what's out there and figuring out other good research sources. I only had one professor complain and that was because rather than go to the version of the article I cited they searched for the article and found an updated version which didn't match what I used. I explained how all versions were kept and showed them how to access the exact cite from my paper and they were happy with it.
The problem isn't Wikipedia, it's students who don't understand how to verify information or make a persuasive argument that the information they are citing is valid.
My courses already have an outright ban on Wikipedia as a research source; most CS professors know how bad it is for edits and will reject it. Social science courses seem to allow it, but once you tell them it can be edited arbitrarily by anyone, they usually tell the course they can no longer use it.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the local paper -- they repeatedly run sidebars on the front page with their citation attributed to Wikipedia. This is a paper with about 400k circulation, too, so not a country bumpkin paper.
They shoud say:
/., I won't trust it for 2 weeks :)
"Every year we get people with inaccuracies from wikipedia. You might not want to use it exclusivly"
If someone tunrs in a paper with incorrect historic information, give them an 'F'.
By college, student certianly should begin seeing consequences like these.
That said. Wikipedia is purprisingle accurate most of the time.
The main exceptions is when someothing suddenly gain mind spaces, or controversial items.
For example, I just looked up the War of 1812, and it seemed to give pretty good information. Not a detailed paper on many of the interacasy, but anyone who reads it would ahve some basic fact.
Not that I mentioned it on
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I remember a French professor named Alain Finkielkraut who held a seminar here in Norway once who stated in the newspaper that "the internet is garbage" (exact quote) because it consistes of accurate and inaccurate information (or outright lies) next to each other.
While we should not underestimate the value of Wikipedia as a tool for sparking interest, and public information, it is not an scietifict/academic source of information. The shear plasticity of the articles should make it obvious that it is not a good place to cite, contrary to reputed printed on online journals or works with a strict editorial regime and peer review system. (this relates a bit to a previous slashdot article about people not being able to see the difference between credible and doubtfull source of information online).
That said, Wikis in general can be wonderfull for science, especially if the people contributing are limited, but only for documentation and growing knowledge.
Seems reasonable to me. A well written Wikipedia article already cites its sources. Just follow the trail and in the process learn whether that particular article is accurate.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
You already aren't allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for Wikipedia articles!
students don't have to pay for expensive dead tree books that they rarely open.
The average cost of a year of (private) college is $28,000 and rising fast, and you're worried about an extra $150 textbook? Say what?
A dead-tree book is about the most cost-efficient possible way to get an education. Beats the heck out of forking over (assuming you take 8 courses a year, tuition is half the total cost of college, and each course has about 30 one-hour lectures) roughly $1-2 a minute to listen to a lecture on the subject.
I only wish it were possible to buy the books, do some original research in the field (e.g. visit Rome, the National Archives, a farm, or a GM plant for yourself), discuss with your fellow students electronically -- and then turn up at the college for two weeks to take final exams. That'd save me (with two kids) a cool quarter of a $million...
Well, I think that Middlebury College had better deal with their burgeoning African elephant population. It's shot up tremendously there recently. I hear that elephants LOOOOVE "little ivies".
Other professors at the school agree, but note that they're also enthusiastic contributors to Wikipedia.
...
Am I the only one to see a great learning opportunity here?
"Ok kids, this week you each have to find five false information on the Roman Empire in Wikipedia, and correct them. You have 2 days to find the errors, 3 to submit me your corrections, and we will apply the changes using the school account on Friday".
Good teaching on history, computers, social share of knowledge,
The encyclopedia that's editable by admins who may or may not know what they're talking about.
I use Wikipedia practically daily. It's a great first stop for a random search, but it doesn't have any credibility as a primary research source.
I think the professors are taking the wrong approach by announcing a ban on it, however. A much better response would be to assign specific Wikipedia entries (or ask students to select their own) related to the course subject, and then make it the students' task to fact-check the entry.
This would force students to look beyond the superficial information Wikipedia offers and also test the accuracy of the information one finds on Wikipedia.
Banning it is just a variation of Eric Cartman's "Respect mah authorit-ay!", whereas using Wikipedia as the basis for a critical thinking assignment might actually teach students something.
My $0.02.
Wikipedia came in ahead of Britannica in terms of accuracy for most articles.
Maybe -- and I don't think I'm going out on a limb -- is that history professors are finding out they are idiots by their students, and don't like the feeling.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
1. wikipedia changes, so your citation might not be there when someone goes to check it. 2. wikipedia is not always accurate (i guess other sources have this problem too) Use wikipedia to learn something, not to cite it. I really DO think wikipedia should release permanent versions of their encyclopedia. For example release a 2006 wikipedia that can't be changed, showing all the information collected at that point. U can use wikipedia to get references through their links. Anyone who thinks u should be able to cite wikipedia is a fool.
My English, Science and History teachers (this is 9th grade) have banned us from using Wikipedia. My solution? Use the MediaWiki software to mirror Wikipedia (from a database dump) on my own computer! Failing that, you can use answers.com, which shows Wikipedia articles.
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They should teach them a better lesson: To not rely on one source, no matter which one it is, for all or the majority of their research.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If I were still a student I'd read the wiki article, check out the citations, read the cited articles, and then cite them instead of the wiki.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This has everything to do with control of information and knowledge by the professor's and big business education and much less to do with Wikipedia. If the professor's think something is inaccurate on Wikipedia, they can fix it. Access to good sourceable information in regards to history is not as available as one would think. Professor's feel that they need to remain the gatekeepers of knowledge to keep they jobs secure.
Not quite Wikipedia per the question posed in the article but... (anyway, many/most posters have the correct idea about following citations.)
r and in the process out-compete Airbus, their major rival. So, what place does Wikipedia have in education? I say the same as everyone else: 'follow the citations'. On the other hand, what about the underlying technology? It seems reasonable to me that whole courses could be run on a Wiki. Properly used, the technology has the potential to radically transform education.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have written a book called Wikinomics http://www.wikinomics.com./ They point out that a Wiki is an amazing collaboration tool that can/will turn academia on its ear. An open source collaborative model makes very complex projects much easier to manage. One example they give is the way Boeing now designs aircraft. By abandoning top down design and management, they get the benefits predicted in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaa
I'm not so certain that a text book is the best source of information either. I recall many, many errors in my text books during my college days. In truth, I'm not at all certain what is an accurate source of information these days.
I find it hard to believe it would even get to the point where this has to come up. I'd say professors are doing something wrong if their students get to the point of citing Wikipedia. At the same time I think Wikipedia could be a really useful tool for universities or high schools in class even. A challenge basically. I say; For students of any subjects: research relevant portions of Wikipedia, read them and cross reference authoritative sources to make corrections and improve the entries found to lack something and then in larger segments report on their findings, corrections and what they learned in the process.
It would be a good way to teach people how to properly use Wikipedia, how to be objective, learning a subject, learning where information tends to vary or where mis-knowledge comes up and retention of knowledge can only be improved in this kind of process. They'd be contributing to making Wikipedia a better resource and it's a far more comprehensive learning strategy than I'd ever seen applied in school.
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"You mean there are Profs that accept papers citing Wikipedia? Wait a minute, this story must be a joke because when I looked up Middlebury University on Wikipedia, it said it said the college went bankrupt and was closed... For four years it has been my policy to give an F to any student paper that uses Wikipedia as a academic source (students may cite it as a source of folk knowledge). But I go much further than this, sometimes I project wikipedia above me and enter convincing but bogus information into existing entries (change dates, killing spouses, or adding the influence of tidal forces of Visigoths or plagues throughout history) to show students why they shouldn't trust this public graffiti board. Believe me, not even Mott the Hopple is safe..." ^ Comment From TFA It's douche bags like this who fuck up wikipedia. Not only does he change it to screw his students, but then anyone else who checks out that site.
"This seems consistent to me--when I was in college, citing any encyclopedias was strongly discouraged."
Indeed, citing Wikipedia is the cyber equivalent of citing "They Say..." Wikipedia is not a citable source anymore than your telephone is. Wikipedia is a conduit for information not an actual source.
Hell I had a China professor in WI that I'm convinced used Wikipedia as his sole source. He was always going on about his "source" but never actually listed a source. Needless to day his info and wikipedia were eerily similar. But we watched movies all day, he said Stalin was a Jerkass and I got an A. Go wikipedia. Seriously though I would use wikipedia to get a broad base of information to draw on a topic then I would go focus on "hard" sources in the library. While I would never use wikipedia directly as a source it is fantastic for getting a general overview of just about any topic you can think of.
For papers, Wikipedia is a definate no dice. It's a good start to find other sources, or to give you an idea of what you need to know, but It's not quite trustworthy. On the other hand, Wikipedia can be an excellent source for studying and review. I have had several courses in which not only did wikipedia entries cover certain material better, but provided alot of information that ended up being on the finals.
Education should not come from opinion, it should come from facts. While it is nice to learn about theory in classrooms, the education by theory should be left to post graduate work.
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The best articles on Wikipedia cite multiple sources and are concerned with multiple aspects of the topic at hand.
The best use of those articles is as a pointer to their original sources. When I was in school, I used old term papers and theses as a guide to find good research materials.
If you can't find the underlying research on your own, Wikipedia is a good choice. I've purchased several books because they were cited as sources.
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
If the information you wish to use from Wikipedia is good, it should have cited sources of its own. Why read second-hand information, when you can use these sources to find out more yourself. If nothing else, its a place to start looking that will hopefully point you to more "respectable" information that professors prefer and are accustomed to.
"What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?" At the most the links to more reliable sources available at the bottom of the article, and may be the pictures. I have nothing against Wiki. Infact, I use it often on a daily basis(collecting useless info, of course), but I would certainly not include into education. The state of education is bad in most places as it is.
Wkipedia should be used by students as simply a general guid to sudjects that they are not familiar with. I t should be the same as asking a freind who just happens to know alot about everything. It should be used as a basic, 'here's-the-idea' type resource. For example, if I had to give a report on the effects of.....say....."the influence of metallurgical advances on the evolution of cooking utensils", I would probably go to Wikipedia for a rough idea about coking utensils and metallugy. I know about metallurgy, but not enough to help with the specific application in question. BUT, if I go to Wiki for info on cooking utensils and, separaely, metallurgy, I would probably have a good idea what was going on, but nothing accurate enough to write a report on, but enough to get me headed in the right direction.
Using Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is just asking for a problem. The Professors have every argument prohibiting it's use as a source or citation in reports. It's simply too inaccurate, and, from the student's vantage point, impossible to tell what and where *exactly* innacuracies are.
I would NEVER and HAVE NEVER used Wikipedia as a 'source' of information. The only things I use it for is if I want to get a basic hold on a subject that I don't anything about. If you want accurate, buy the World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica encyclopedias.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
It's really nothing new. My masters degree supervisor warned my that I can't use a source that isn't signed by someone. As I heard it's a univ wide rule. So in a way wikipedia is banned here.
Anyway citing a source is good writing practice. I'm kind of surprised that you have to ban Wikipedia.
xb0x
If I were teaching a class I would ban Wikipedia on the grounds that delete "non-notable" content. Thereby it's not an authorative source of ANY data, since any data that any one editor doesn't deem notable will get deleted.
Wikipedia is quickly turning into an astroturfing playground for hardcore subject nerds (note how many comic book articles there are and then look how many webcomic articles there are, and how many pages dedicated to characters of comic book characters... no matter how little role they had in some comic in the 70's.) that get into editing wars with each other and declare any attempt to preserve or delete content they edited as sockpuppeting or meatpuppeting or whatever the crap they call it.
Wikipedia is not a credable source of any material any more than the local newspaper, and we all know how the media likes to spin things. If you are going to use wikipedia, skip the content and go straight to the links at the bottom of most articles that are researched. Then you don't get all the information and nothing "not-notable" omitted.
Wikipedia is the slashdot equivilent of an encyclopedia, full of subject material only the nerds want or care about and everything else is not-notable.
And just as often, most of the greatest minds have been at one point in fundamental disagreement with each other. I.e., they're often wrong. One aspect of being great is daring to make great mistakes.
However, the argument here is about Wikipedia being cited. Citing primary sources will not change whether or not the professor is in fundamental disagreement with the larger community. That said, primary sources are what the students should be using for their own research. One should not cite Wikipedia any more than one should cite Encyclopedia Brittanica - except for those very few rare cases, if any, where Wikipedia might actually be the primary source.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Perhaps wikipedia should have peer-reviewed revisions of certain articles.
It would be neat if a group of accredited individuals would be willing to take the time to review certain popular articles and make expert revisions and release a "green" revision of an article. There could be a link on the article page saying, "click here for the peer-reviewed revision from 11-29-06" or something to that nature.
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Since when can you write a college history paper citing any encyclopedia article as a source? In college history classes, aren't you supposed to, like, read books on the subject?
I hated it when professors would mandate that you couldn't have any sources from "The Internet", or had to have so many that were from "real books". Get with the times people. Sure, you could argue that "The Internet" as a whole is not reliable because crackpots can post their own web page. But is "printed media" as a whole any better? It's about judging the validity of an individual source, but these idiots didn't realize that "The Internet" wasn't one big source. In the case of Wikipedia, however, I have to agree that it shouldn't be directly cited. It's a frequently changing page which will allow for some inaccuracies. While the overall community tries their best to moderate it, it's feasible that some BS might make its way out there just long enough for a student to cite it in his paper. Any good Wikipediaer will cite sources for the information he's putting up there, so the student might as well follow the link and quote the other source if it's reputable.
It's mostly a good reference for references. Meaning, it's a nice place to go to while looking for sources. Articles tend to point to other sources or cite stuff which would make good material for whatever you're doing/researching. However, the Wikipedia article itself should never be used as a source.
If nothing else, imagine your professor leafing through your bibliography and coming across a random IP address (or username) being credited for the edits, with the host site being wikipedia. Half will not know what an IP address is, and the other half will either laugh hysterically or cry. Either way, red pens will likely come out.
We need to disentangle why Wikipedia (and other resources) might not be suitable for citing
1. Rapidly changing content. Can be resolved be identifying which specific version is being referred to, like any other resource.
2. Not authoritative. University level educators usually prefer only peer-reviewed material to be cited, or material to have been checked by some reasonably trustworthy rigourous procedure. This is where Wikipedia is potentially weakest, or perhaps most challenging of the traditional model.
I can understand the college making its life easier by a blanket ban on Wikipedia, it's up to Wikipedia to raise its standards to be acceptable to academic institutions.
In a number of cases I know of high quality articles, for example where the primary authors are world-renown in the field they are writing on. But the amount of work required to identify high quality articles is probably still too great for a harassed lecturer who has a hundred essays to mark amongst a thousand other jobs, I can understand them falling back on only accepting from known sources.
My question would be: what does Wikipedia have to do to become accepted as an academic source?
They have been making money from script sales for years, now Wikipedia replaced them.
Sometimes it can be the worst place for starting depending upon what the user's intent is, at least in terms of biography articles which contain a criticism or controversy section.
I've noticed that a lot of articles lean on the "NPOV" idea to the point of believing that any and every point of view or interpretation is valid and must be represented no matter how off base, vindictive (i.e. having an agenda) or in the minority the opinion is.
Take, for example a fiction author who writes children's books. I've seen several of them who have criticism / controversy sections listing outlandish and quite frankly absurd interpretations of both their works and or viewpoints, often to the point of labeling them as such things as racist, nazi's, deriding their work because of their religious beliefs, etc -- most of the criticism coming from such highly reputable sources as unpublished authors and even blogs. Ultimately, a lot of these things are put up by those having an "agenda". Try to remove these things and you will be shouted down by hordes of other people screaming "NPOV! NPOV!".
The problem is that once these things get into an article, no matter how much it is stressed that the opinions are in the minority, etc., they will still appear as "important" to the user. We all know that it is a starting point for information and that you should research on your own, however, first impressions should be considered. And your first impression of something from an encyclopedia should be factual.
I, for one have a problem with criticism / critique / etc. being listed in something that is supposed to be a repository for facts. The latter seem to be opinions pretending to be facts.
I chose this example because I'd been selecting a book for kids to read and had someone comment: "But isn't that a not-so-nice person who is publishing propoganda? I saw it in Wikipedia...."
I think that professors should assign students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their grade. All entries and modifications should be run passed the professor first, of course, and all factual assertions should be cited - but I think that there is an enormous opportunity to increase the value of both the encyclopedia and the students' educational experience. Learning to write articles and express factual information succinctly is just too important a skill to forgo. Also, if Academia were to become more involved in the quality control of the encyclopedia, they might be more apt to use it.
Perhaps universities could provide this as remedial education, but no one should start higher education without knowing how to do proper research; at that level, students should know how to perform research.
I agree that Wikipedia should not be cited directly, but like the parent poster I find it provides a good overview of the subject and usually pushes me in the right direction for deeper research. After all, every good Wikipedian cites his sources.
While completing my last degree, I was forbidden from using (or at least citing) Wikipedia. Any papers submitted with Wikipedia as a source were automatically rejected. this was across the board- not just one professor.
I debated this often. Not once was a professor able to give me an acceptable answer.
Yes, I fully understand the possible "cons" to using Wikipedia, but if we were not able to tell a defaced article from a real one, we should not have been in a Masters class.
Yet another reason I think academics are WAY overrated. I prefer experience and common sense to a degree when I am interviewing for an opening. It has served me well so far.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
When I first started college in 1975, I had been out of the Air Force for only a few months and had come home from Thailand a year earlier. There was a general studies sociology course about economics, which I took.
/.)
On the second day in class the professors (there were three of them) were saying how all the world's workers would be making as little as workers in a third world country in ten years. I raised my hand and argued with them, pointing out that in Thailand (then a 3rd world country with little infrastructure; the nearest town had no electricity, gas, running water, or paved roads) although a worker made only $1000 a year, the economy was completely different. There you only had to pay a nickle to go about anywhere within an hour's drive, my extravagant bungalow had cost me $30 a month, I could feed myself and three whores in a nice restaraunt for a dollar, including beer, and so on. I argued that for labor prices to fall, the price of everything else had to fall (or hilarity ensues, as we say at
Their answer was that you have no housing costs if you own your home (!!!) and you could always live on beans and peanut butter.
I called them idiots, stomped out of class (with several others following and several others laughing) and dropped the idiots' classes. Perhaps one of the morons are reading this now, and have finally realized that their predictions were wrong (and stupid) or at least over thirty years late. Or maybe, being the dumbasses they are, still believe it.
Maybe all these inaccuracies I hear about on Wikipedia are from college professors? I've looked up lots of stuff on the wiki and have only found one bad item, and it was a bit of a nit anyway (Wikipedia stated only that the CrystalLens offered nearly glasses-free seeing, when I'd done away with glasses altogether; I corrected it by adding that "some patients can do away with glasses altogether" (I wonder if it stuck?).
But at any rate (and more on topic), you don't cite the Encyclopedia Britannica (let alone Encarta!) in a college paper. Why is disallowing Wikipedia a bad thing? You use it as a starting point to your research, not the end point.
Everyone knows what's great about Wikipedia. But people in the education system should especially be for improving it rather than working against it.
Here's an idea for professors: have one of your assignments be to make or substantially improve an article relating to the topic you wish to teach. It's no surprise that the goal for ideal Wikipedia articles coincides exactly with the goals for well-written papers in University-level classes. In particular, Wikipedia pushes for established, cited sources; clear presentation and logical flow; and accurate, unbiased reporting.
It kills two birds with one stone- students must research and write their papers, and Wikipedia becomes that much more of a well-written, credible source of information.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
What if Wikipedia is the primary source?
.info magazine was the first mass-market magazine produced using desktop publishing methods and software. That tidbit is nowhere else. As the former editor of said magazine, I would like to see that bit of information preserved and distributed. But without Wikipedia, where are you going to find it?
For example, if you were researching the origins and history of desktop publishing, there is only one source anywhere that will tell you that
(And yes, I'm the one who added that to the Wikipedia article, along with a link to a scan of the 'Personal Publishing' magazine article that first acknowledged the fact.)
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
If Wikipedia is not good enough for schools, why should it be good enough for the rest of us ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Might be interesting if students were asked to edit Wikipedia articles based on their corrected papers.
Bruce A. Knack
Silicon Surfers
Wikipedia has in it the ability to give the source of the information that is being given. Since it's so prone to inaccuracies (depending on the subjuect and when you actually look at the page) those sources are invaluable as proof of accuracy, but still do not make it any more reliable.
If I were a teacher I would encourage students to use wikipedia, but when the information is used, to seek the source listed to verify it and use it as the listed reference in their papers.
I've found Wikipedia to be fine for non-contraversial topics, otherwise it's often full of malcontent among the editors, edit wars, and is basically unreliable. I don't blame any school if they ban it's use as a source. The inmates are running the asylum.
but that's it. The main problem with it is the lack of citations on facts. Now I understand why they're not included, I couldn't be bothered when I added information to it, so I can't expect other people to.
Actually re-reading the story I don't think the administration is being harsh, or wikipedia is being 'bad' - I think the students writing the papers were just offensively lazy and stupid. By all means read wikipedia, but only use information linked by citation to a reputable source - and then cite that source.
Seriously. Students citing encyclopedias (regardless of accuracy) for papers in college is just lame/lazy/stupid. Then again, many students these days never really learn how to properly research things other than by using Google et al.
I for one support the ban and will soon be writing an academic article about it on Wikipedia for students to cite when they bitch about not being able to cite Wikipedia in class.
Than what is? Many many encyclopedias combined? or some person who assigns themself as an authorative source? or just a book specializing on a subject?
If the source is bad, then information is wrong. If information is wrong, then why on earth it matters if the source is wikipedia or blahblahpedia?
If info is wrong, give them a D and that is it.
There are an awful lot of digital and printed info sources that are plain wrong.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I teach middle school English and use Wikipedia as a research beginning point and as a discussion starter. In science, the students learn to do preliminary observation before developing a hypothesis- same in English. It's also valuable as an example of finding valid sources on the internet. I'll pull up a piece of crap Wikipedia article and compare it to a great one to help them discern between different online sources. They're still learning to effectively evaluate information. Bottom line: do I let them cite it? Heck no. Is it educationally valuable? Yes.
...that they could use it as a starting place for planning out their research. It is excellent for that. You can very quickly find worthwhile generalities on most subjects, and often encounter trivial but useful details not easily found elsewhere, just because some geek for that topic took the time to care and fill out the article. Generally, because it is an encyclopaedia, it is particularly useful for finding the connections and boundaries between topics--in other words, for building up an outline and setting research priorities.
Of course, I made it entirely explicit that one cannot cite wikipedia directly in a research paper, just as they couldn't cite the Britannica or the CDROM encyclopaedia they have at home. I was stunned when these supposedly literate, intelligent, creative 19 year-olds had trouble grasping the concept of primary sources--proof to me that public education is really a thinly disguised low-security vocational prison.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Well, of course no encyclopedia is a primary source. Wikipedia free-for-all makes it more susceptible to being at least unverified.
What the professors should do is impose a detention on every student that cites Wikipedia: for every cite, let them go correct the error, and find and correct three other errors in their area of study.
Everyone wins this way: the information gets corrected, the student learns, and the public gets better info.
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Wikipedia does not allow original research, so all information on a page must be cited. Therefore, students can just cite the source that Wikipedia used to get their information.
"We have exactly as much freedom as we are willing to demand and as we can defend."
I doubt this will even get modded up to the point where anyone will see it, but I've cited Wikipedia. It was for a math research paper; the Wikipedia article had a much clearer derivation of an identity than I could find in any textbook. I checked the math and found it believable, and it wasn't cited. I wasn't about to take credit for it myself; who the hell else was I supposed to cite? For that matter, how are students expected to deal with Wikipedia entries citing books they can't get their hands on, or websites that no longer exist? It's pretty harsh to think that a fact's probably out there, but you can't use it because you can't get to the original source. I know I'm in the tiny minority, but if I were grading a student who cited Wikipedia I don't think I'd blink. In some subjects (those esoteric enough that it doesn't occur to pranksters to vandalize them - I'm thinking specifically higher math) it's pretty well peer-reviewed.
Every time the professor reads in the paper something like "Servantes was the first postmodernist", he goes back to Wikipedia and edits it to "Servantes has may be no relation whatsoever to the postmodernist", then goes to the students and proves them wrong with Wikipedia.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
012607 at 20:05:05 Greenwich Mean Time, Wikipedia lists Jesus Christ as an alumni of Middlebury. [wikipedia]
I see nothing wrong with five meals a day
Here's a fun trick you could play on students.
...
1) Put up an article on wikipedia about a made up event. Let's say.. "The Battle of Werteppa"
2) Tell the students to write a research paper on it, don't require any citations.
3)
4) Profit
Wikipedia articles are supposed to in turn cite THEIR sources. If you're going to use Wikipedia, then track down the original sources of the Wikipedia article and cite those instead. Judge those sources on their merits, rather than trusting wikieditors to judge your sources for you. It doesn't really add much work, and you at least have a better chance of guessing if you're spouting gibberish. If you can't be bothered to do old fashioned book research, at least you can do that much.
I had an English class where the teacher forbid the use of Wikipedia because anybody could go on there and write whatever they wanted. Apparently, this is not how the internet works. All information is thoroughly checked before it appears in Google. Nobody would post biased studies or fake documentaries on the internet.
In my opinion Wikipedia is much more reliable than some random website because corrections can be made and there is more than one point of view. Besides, if you are writing a paper you should be using more than one source anyway, and if you are writing a paper just for the sake of writing, the facts don't matter anyway.
A "good" wikipedia article has it's sources cited as well, so a student who wants to cite something found on Wikipedia can just double-check the source material, and then cite THAT source. Wikipedia is a good tool to help with research, but I wouldn't use it as a source. You'd be citing the source of a source afterall, right?
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
"The question is, is Wikipedia any more inaccurate than the multitudes of other sources online?"
It's not any more inaccurate, but, then again, most other online sources don't claim to be encyclopedias.
If it were called Wiki-pinion would it garner so much more trust?
If the Prof. thinks that the wikipedia information is so bad maybe it would be a good class project to improve the accuracy.
His students would learn and it would benefit the entire world.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Aren't we officially calling The Wikipedia "TSPWSATU" - The Site Popular With Students And the Unemployed? You could run a small city from the electricity used to edit the slashdot entry. Number one coffee table asset and origin of the verb To Wiki. A student once submitted an assignment to me which consisted of the entire text of the wikipedia entry on tea. Including links. The student was very surprised to be awarded zero. Even asked me if they could re-submit it!
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
If an inaccuracy is quoted from Wikipedia, why does the professor not log in and correct the offending entries? This benefits all of society and others working in the same field.
If many professors participate, it also self-forms a peer review system.
Encyclopedias are bad textbooks, but some sort of Wikitextbook is not a bad idea. In some areas, the textbooks are mediocre at best, but I wouldn't do any better myself because of the holes in my knowledge. A collaboration where experts provide the knowledge and readers help make it readable would be worthy.
I use Wikipedia in my sourcing, but not as the only or dedicated source. I use it because I find much of the information accurate, at least in my field.
My professors hate it, but none have marked me yet for using it...
--E--
Some of you will probably notice in well written Wikipedia articles that most statements relating to a subject are usually followed by a [#] that goes to a citation. I'd say use Wikipedia as a starting point and go after those citations as sources if you are going to use the internet as a source. The problem with Wikipedia for any semi-serious research is what makes it appeal to most people as a general references, it is editable and even though putting something stupid in such as "You Suck! CmdrTaco!!!!" will usually get surpressed within a couple of hours it still makes it less reliable. The Citations, on the other hand, may send you to a better source. Again this is if you must use the internet and I am guessing that it isn't that serious of an assignment (A homework assignment as opposed to a thesis/actual research).
Doesn't anyone else remember the CNET article from '05 citing that Wikipedia was más o menos as accurate as Britannica?? http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
Fork and audit, like OpenBSD... or wat it NetBSD, I always mix them up. One of these was forked and audited for security. It seems like the same approach could work here. The articles just wouldn't be as fresh. That's OK though, because one of the Wiki problems is that it blurs the line between encyclopedia and news.
"No, I don't think people should cite it, and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either -- the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet." -Jimmy Wales
I'm surprised that no one mentioned yet how odd it is that College students are citing encyclopedias instead of using primary sources in the first place...
If I were a student then I will do: 1) use all information or opinion you have found in Wikipedia 2) list the references found in Wikipedia as citations in your paper 3) turn in your paper and wait to get a good grade and go play video game That would resolve all concerns of your professors and this thread of discussions
I completely agree with the ban on using Wikipedia for college level work. First, since it changes, you can't have anyone go back and continue your research. Secondly, if people in college are actually using wikipedia or an encyclopedia to get their research information, they need to be ashamed of themselves.
The fact that they even need to ban it says a lot about the current state of academics. Wkipedia is a great tool for elementary school reports, or personal learning, but it is NOT a college level resource and should never attempt to be. Personally, were I a history professor, I would flunk every single person who listed Wikipedia as a reference. Higher education is part and parcel with research, which should actually take a bit of work. Otherwise, why dig through old ruins trying to find new papryus scrolls, when you could just google it.
Students love to cite Wikipedia, they don't love to cite encyclopedias. They don't have to belabour the encyclopedia point in college because it's extremely rare. If a student does cite one, you just talk to them about it. However students love to cite Wikipedia because it's easy, and because many people seem to believe it's a good source. Online I get Wikipedia cited at me all the time to try and prove one thing or another and the person doing the citing gets mad and calls me an idiot if I say it's not a valid source.
That's why universities are having to start having policies dealing with Wikipedia in particular, is because they have tons and tons of students citing it (often exclusively) in research papers.
floks, this is the same encyclopedia that once said the population of elephants had just tripled, bush is a martian, hillary clinton is republican and famously, some dude was responsible for the RFK and JFK assasinations. Its not a relible source and probably should have a banner somewhere explaining that is is "facts" decided democratically or via an edit war.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I took a Computer Science class at middlebury this year, no such bs there.
what kind of idiot cites an encyclopedia in a paper anyhow?
Wikipedia cites it's references at the bottom of the article. I don't ever take information straight from the wiki, I do however go over the article on the wiki, and follow the relevant links and then cite those in my papers.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
they'll be banning cites from 'For Dummies' books.
So much for my "Ancient Egyptian Algebra For Dummies" purchase.
A textbook is a poor replacement for research especially when it comes to history. I've seen more blatantly incorrect information in college level history books then in Wikipedia (and I'm not implying Wikipedia is anywhere near perfect). Unfortunately most professors select textbooks that support their own prejudices (many times even their own book) for the courses they teach and aren't open to any viewpoints that may be counter to those prejudices no mater how well supported.
Who is John Galt?
Cite the links the Wikipedia article reference. If there isn't something to back up the information, there's a problem with the accuracy in the first place. Wikipedia should be a jump point into deeper research, not the primary source. Typically, the articles are a summation of something much more deep. My $.02
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Is banned as a source. They cannot ban students from looking at Wikipedia. Even private schools can't say you can't read something in your free time off campus. However they can, and it looks like are, considering banning citing it as a source period. That's perfectly enforceable.
I think maybe it should only be banned as being cited as the sole source of information. It's not hard to head to the campus library and read a few books on the subject. Failing that, just fail the students who consulted only wikipedia and has a paper full of false information. A bad report is a bad report. What does it matter what the bad source was?
Gotcha!
Best sources of info:
1) Scientific Discovery
2) Historical Evidence (videos, documents, etc)
3) Expert Interpretation (Professional Historians, Archaeologists, etc)
4) Non-expert Summary (Encylopedias, Journalists)
5) Mommy and Daddy
Wikipedia is somewhere between 4 and 5.
Project Assignment:
Read some Wikipedia entries on topics covered in this course. Identify at least one significant error, and get it corrected. Document both the error and your corrected version using primary sources.
Depending on the covered topics, and the ease of finding errors in the Wikipedia coverage of those topics, this could be a one-week homework assignment, a full term project, or something in between.
I've always used the web in general and wikipedia as an opening paragraph sort of thing. You have something to research or an argument to make so you do a quick search. Pull up a few things that might make a good intro and proceed to draw on better "primary" sources where you can.
I couldn't agree more with what you and ifdef are saying about using it as a stepping stone. It's an excellent resource in multiple fields.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Furthermore, textbooks are (in my opinion) a racket, and are entirely inappropriate to entire disciplines. They're an effective tool for sciences and engineering, where there is a body of knowledge and methodologies that you have to learn to become an effective scientist or engineer - even if you ultimately grow to question those assumptions. Of course, the best professors do more than teach from the book in any field, but there's not really any question as to, for example, whether L'Hospital's Rule is something you learn in the study of Calculus.
In other fields, such as history and the humanities, textbooks chain you to learning what some editor thought was the best thing for you to learn, and chain the professor to teaching that material. Then, on top of that, you have to buy a $100 course reader (which is a racket in and of itself). You end up being taught the same material over and over again, and either risk a low grade if you go outside of the course boundaries and write on something that's not in the textbook which the professor may not be familiar with, or are doomed to write the same dull essay your peers are writing. It's actually anti-research. You're not building any knowledge, you're just making weak points based on a weak body of knowledge given to you by the instructor, and fighting with your peers for source materials in the library. In an age where everything in public domain can be put online, why isn't it all online? Why do we have to even buy the freaking books, other than to keep publisher's wallets fat and for our professors to grease their palms so they get published in turn?
If you read Wikipedia's policy on acceptable sources, they explicitly excludes wikis.
I find it hard to blame a college for holding the same standards for sources.
I could not agree more. This is college we are talking about. Wikipedia might be a great "source of sources," but should never be used as a source itself. These professors want students to draw their own conclusions, not have them drawn for them by some Wikipedia author.
Smeghead every day of the week.
Citing the Wayback Machine - now that might work.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Now everyone knows Oregon is Idaho's Portugal!
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
My teacher decided against a textbook and saved us all a lot of money by providing links to wikipedia articles on each topic we cover. Obviously not ever professor out there is up in arms, but I do realize that the subject of the class matters a lot (I'm taking a computer science course).
Lot of people seem to think that because Wikipedia isn't "worse" than other encyclopedias that somehow it is therefore reasonable to cite. No one should be citing encyclopedias, except maybe second graders. (Even then, I'd argue it's probably important to get them started doing research the right way... but that's beside the point.)
As has been mentioned way too many times by now, Wikipedia is fine for getting started on research. The nature of Wikipedia is such that it is a collection of information from other sources (sometimes, unfortunately, that source is only the mind of some random internet user). Those sources should (maybe) be cited. Wikipedia should not. (Feel free to use it as a works consulted, though!)
These professors are simply holding students to the same standards the academic community (and the planet) holds the professors to. In submitting an academic article or tenure packet, you certainly wouldn't be allowed to cite Wikipedia as a publication or as a reference. If you contributed to Wikipedia, you would be nuts to claim Wikipedia contributions as part of your CV. You'd be laughed out of your department (unless you were doing a study of Wikipedia as part of your work). I personally love Wikipedia for a "zeroth order" pass on a subject (especially obscure ones), but the lack of accountability makes it an abysmal reference for serious work. That said, the good articles on Wikipedia have lists of real references which can actually jump start a new research topic.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Instad of banning Wikipedia as a reference source, why don't the lecturers who think it contains incorrect information actually take time out to fix it themselves? If they each did that once, it would end the problem and also benefit everyone else.
College Students should be citing Primary Sources. Period. Wikipedia is a secondary and tertiary source. If a student cites wikipedia, its pure intellectual laziness. Students should be reading scholarly treatises, and only using wikipedia as background and starting material. The debate really is this simple.
The argument against citing Wikipedia really has nothing to do with concerns over the truthfulness or objectivity of the articles on Wikipedia. Academic research is based on the idea that researchers can build upon the knowledge of other researchers. To ensure that the tree of human knowledge has a solid foundation, academic papers contain citations so that one can trace which researcher made what statements.
The problem is that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous for all practical purposes, so citing a Wikipedia article, even if you cite a snapshot of it, is useless for determining the source of the information. That defeats the purpose of citations.
However, if you happen to be doing sociology-type research on how Wikipedia users interact with each other, and you are using Wikipedia content as the data you are analyzing, the cite away!
Disclaimers:
I am shocked that Wikipedia is taken as seriously as it is, and made an integral part of Answers.com, Google, etc. The only thing Wikipedia is useful for is "pop culture." When I was in college, too many people used Wikipedia as sources and didn't even know what it was, or how inaccurate it was.
I've had a few lecturers who have really disliked wikipedia as a source (a truely irational dislike), but I think on the whole if you're citing it you're already on the wrong track. As some people have mentioned above when you're writting a degree level essay you really need to get authoritative texts which have been written by people who really know their subject matter (and have a phd, it doesn't make them smarter, but it does at least let you know that they have a level of academic discipline).
If you do use wikipedia, don't copy from it, and don't reference it - it works great as a search engine though, look at the articles which are cited on there which can inform you of the bigger picture etc.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I went to school in California, so it's remarkable that I can tie my own shoes or go to the bathroom without assistance.
I went to K-12 in California, and I still can't tie my own shoes. You must have grown up in Atherton.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I don't want to offend, but you should be careful with your terms. Scientific testing typically means replicable experimentation, and most of life is not replicable. Nonetheless we can agree that some things are "real," that is, more than opinion, through other means. You can state that a computer of some type is transcribing my post (via keyboard or whatever), and sending it to be shown on /. A security camera video can demonstrate the presence of someone at an ATM. And so forth....
Likewise, scientific experimentation doesn't always demonstrate fact, but the opinion most scientists view as fact. Experimentation and research is based on the taxonomies and factors chosen by scientists, which can be far from true. As late as 1940 scientists like Herbert Ives were publishing articles in respected journals (Science, I think) that showed how experimentation "proved" the existence of a luminiferous ether....
When you come down to it, the only definition of "real" that matters are those bits of direct experience agreed upon by the general community.
This isn't even an issue. If I had cited an encylopedia article, ANY encyclopedia article, for even the most basic college paper -- I would have been sincerely marked down. An encylopedia, especially wikipedia, can be a great place to begin for overall knowledge on a subject. But it should never be the place you finish on any subject that you really care about.
The internet is hard to cite anyway because pages are so fluid. The information you cited yesterday might be gone today. Wikipedia is even more unreliable than the internet at large as far as durability of a specific piece of information, since a single article can change dozens or hundreds of times in a day.
What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
A guidance to a subject? Where you can read on further by using the article's references.
I can understand this stance, and think it should in fact be applied to all encyclopedias (although perhaps a ban is a bit harsh; a warning or two to being with could be useful for any delusioned students). The reason I believe this is because encyclopedias are just fact compilations anyway. I think one should rather get used to searching papers on the subject (universities often have pretty good resources for this), and especially then papers frequently quoted so it's somewhat notable then. But by all means, use Wikipedia as a starting point!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
That's the problem with wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to it. On some subject matters though the people that contribute to wikipedia end up being good references. On other subject matters the wiki can be crap. If you assume that wikipedia is all fact, then you probably do believe everything you read online, in which case by reading this you have contracted a deadly virus and your ears will fall off.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
What better way to prepare for scholarship than to research something, publish it, and have it torn to shreds by people who know more than you do and by people who know less than you do?
"Update and correct the Wikipedia article on how mystery plays influenced Marlowe and Shakespeare" would be a great assignment."Evaluate and discuss the ensuing edits" would be a great followup.
Think of it this way: those [citation needed] markers are the first step in getting those sources linked. Their purpose is to encourage people who know something about the issue to provide references. Once those sources are linked, not only does the article have more intrinsic value (as the claims at least have some supporting documentation), but it has more value as a research tool to help people find those sources.
Every once in a while I've been reading a Wikipedia article on some subject, seen that marker, and said to myself, "Hey, I read that in XYZ!" I've then gone out, looked for the article, and replaced the citation marker with a footnote. If I hadn't seen the marker, I might not have thought of tracking down the half-remembered source.
I agree with this in principle, as any encyclopedia is a tertiary source. But if a student wants to read and cite a primary source that the institution's library doesn't have an annual subscription to, what should the student do?
An encyclopedia is meant to be an amalgam of information from citable sources. Wikipedia's editing guidelines follow this - you're only supposed to include information that has a verifiable source. So follow the cited sources from Wikipedia (if they exist) and reference those, or if you're lazy, use a site like BookRags that compiles citable sources on tons of topics (including info from Wikipedia), or even (god forbid!) use the library.
After years of fighting with students, I gave up on the term paper. Since I was teaching history and geography, not English 101, it wasn't my job to instruct them in the niceties of doing research papers. I issued threats, I gave flunking grades, I made people rewrite their papers; none of it worked. Every semester I found students in my classes copying stuff directly off Wikipedia, Britannica Online, and just about everywhere else. Even when they didn't plagiarize, they cited online sources to excess, to extreme lengths. I wanted them to dig a little, find out the vagaries of history, get below the surface, get beyond reference works and textbooks. It wasn't going to happen.
I realized the freshman term paper was dead. It had no place outside of English 101. No other 100 level class should have them. But what should I do? Writing is an essential component to a college education. It has to be in as many classes as it can. However, writing assignments do no good if the words either aren't written by the students in the first place, or they depend too much on reference works. You don't take swimming lessons to walk around in the toddler's wading pool. The term paper was already in the trash. The multiple-choice test went with it. All my tests would now contain only short-answer (under fifty words) or essay questions. For the replacement of the term paper, I took a page from my old statistics professor. Back in the day, we could fill a note card with any equations or formulas we wanted and bring it to a test. I put this in action. There was an extra essay test at the end of the semester, with one question, which I gave to the students a month beforehand. They could fill up two sheets of paper with notes and citations - whatever they wanted. They had to cite at least two primary sources and five secondary sources, no encyclopedia citations. And especially no citations from the textbook. I called it an essay test. I was really making them write a term paper in front of me.
Most of the students liked the idea. I was happy with the results, though it was much more work for me (no graduate assistants for lowly instructors - "Grad students, I don't need no stinking grad students!"). I wouldn't recommend the technique for more advanced courses. Being able to make a coherent argument supported by evidence is an essential skill, so term papers have their place in a college education. Still, they don't have to be everywhere. Maybe we could do without them in the first year of college.
An underlying reason Professors could be banning Wikipedia citations is that information is becoming too easy to find there. The Wikipedia sources rather than Wikipedia article is an easy workaround and a more tactful student would already be doing this. If you want a good mark and things come "too easy" a professor or teacher might resent it so its a good precaution to make it look like you put in an effort on the problem. Obscure references can help with this and an excellent source for those references is the Wikipedia. Google is an excellent source of alternate references as well. "You can't handle the truth!" - Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men (1992) Source: Wikipedia
Who said anything about articles? I would imagine that benhocking is referring to pages in Wikipedia's Wikipedia: namespace, which describe the project's own policies and guidelines.
Subject: Open Letter on Wikipedia Academics
Date: January 26, 2007 4:50:13 PM CST
To: monod@middlebury.edu
I came to your email chasing a reference from a Slashdot which reported that your department chose to disqualify student papers which cite the Wikipedia. You have been chosen mostly because you have the warmest portrait in the Middlebury web site staff and faculty directory. I will not presume whether this policy is or will be in fact in effect, but I will suggest that rather than discouraging students from relying on the Wikipedia as a resource perhaps it would be better to require them to assume responsibility for the ways in which they extend it. I challenge you and anyone else in your department to defend a claim that the field of History is threatened by the Wikipedia. Even if that argument held water, it would be more instructive than a continuation of business as usual assuming the absence or irrelevance of the Wikipedia. I think the only difference between the Wikipedia and any other (even academic) doxa is the blistering speed with which it can change. It is a tall order to demonstrate epistemological differences.
What is good academic work?
Why not simply require students to rise above the doxa in the wikipedia and participate by adopting and authoring and providing good citations for the appropriate entries to academic acceptability? When a History student cites and [mis]represents truths [or falsehoods] in their papers without the aptitude to question validate them isn't the tail wagging the dog? If students were encouraged under academic stewardship to adopt a section of the Wikipedia the opposite lesson is learned. You must consider that you have an opportunity to confront the ivory tower problem on very favorable terms if you choose to see it.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
When I was in school, you couldn't cite encyclopedias on research papers. Well, you could include them in your working bibliography, but you couldn't use them for specific citations. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source, useful for obtaining an overview, but for a research paper you're supposed to cite primary sources as much as possible, using secondary sources to fill in the gaps when you have to. I don't see how this has changed with Wikipedia.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Currently I'm taking a brand new course in the U of Maryland physics department, on the topic of building digital instruments with FPGA (reconfigurable integrated circuits). On the syllabus handed out at the first lecture, the professor listed "Wikipedia" as the textbook for the class, along with random things he'd hand out.
:-)
Basically, it's such a brand spanking new topic that there's no textbook material on FPGAs. And the professor is a big fan of Wikipedia. I'm thinking it will be a pretty cool class
My bicyles
Such a decision would effectively disallow students from undertaking any form of wiki research. My dissertation was on wikis and CMS and naturally I cited a lot of material from Wikipedia. It would be difficult for a student to research wikis if they could not cite Wikipedia.
To back up an assertion that George Washington held the first office of POTUS and that George H. W. Bush held the 41st, we can cite a page on whitehouse.gov. If someone later discovers whitehouse.gov to be unreliable, the article remains open to competing sources added to the article or (in cases of the most often vandalized articles) to the article's talk page.
Unless you actually witnessed the event yourself, you can not be sure it actually happened as others may have stated.Wikipedia doesn't give a d*mn about truth. The goal of an encyclopedia is collection of verifiable information. For instance, the scientific theories of aether, phlogiston, and heat as a fluid are no longer considered "true", but it is verifiable that at one time, those theories were widely accepted.
While Wikipedia might have some 'bad' information, newspapers carry all sorts of articles that contain bad information and bad science also. I'm also wondering about all the revisionist history I now know that I was taught by "history" textbooks written by these same history professors. Citations must always "consider the source". You don't want to cite the National Inquirer on a regular basis, but to ban all Wikipedia citations is a reach.
I'm a huge fan and contributor to Wikipedia and I love it. However, it has it's place, and serious academic research is not it, just like any other encyclopedia. They stopped letting me use them to cite sources in middle school, and certainly by college it wasn't even a notion (print or otherwise).
If you look at a few studies, you'll see that it has been said that there are more errors on average in a "real" encyclopedia (Britanica, etc.) than Wikipedia, but that's beside the point. The point is, an encyclopedia by it's very nature is meant to be a brief summary to give you a basic idea of the topic and to give you a place to step off to do real research.
This is why Wikipedia is useful for cultural reference, but not academic work. For example, the other day I wanted to know where the term "prodigal son" came from. It was mentioned in a film I was watching, I had heard it before, and had a vague idea of what it meant, but no real frame of reference. Well, wouldn't you know, there's a whole Wikipedia article about it, and my curiosity was met. I now have a decent, general grasp of where it comes from, could probably explain it half-intelligently to someone else, and I am just the tiniest bit more informed.
That's what Wikipedia is great for. Now, on the other hand, if I were writing a paper about the term "prodigal son", it would be a joke for me to reference the Wiki-entry. It's akin to copying someone else's homework. Now, it's perfectly okay to go and read it, and to look at the references provided and go read them yourself, but expecting a professor to take it seriously when you cite what amounts to a publicly editable database that you yourself could have made the changes to is just lazy, lazy teaching if it occurs.
Encyclopedias have their place in academia, and it's on the bottom rung. I'm actually shocked that they allowed it in the first place. Is this typical? They are a great tool for getting a general overview of a topic, a place to gather basic data for further exploration, but as a reference in an academic work they just don't belong. Encyclopedia's never have, and Wikipedia is no different.
All that said, Long Live the Wiki. :)
AE
But lazy students who turn in papers entirely referenced on Wikipedia deserve to be flunked repeatedly until they learn not to.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Transferring to another school and foregoing loyalty scholarships paid to sophomores, juniors, and seniors is likely more expensive than staying in a given school and buying the journal articles individually. If one transfers, then the "incomplete" or "failed" grade for not being able to complete one's assignment will also transfer. If you mean that a student still in high school should check before accepting a university's invitation, then how does one determine the existence of notable holes in a school's library's journal subscriptions before enrolling?
The Professors got it wrong, when they try to ban an source of information. The ban is an attempt to treat the symptoms and not the course.
If the Students provide a correct reference to their wikipedia source (just like they would do to an article) AND the Students are critical towards the trustworthiness of their sources of information then their is no problem.
I interprete this as the professors disguise of bad education. If they thought the students to be critical about their sources of information, this problem would more or less disappeer
Best Regards Rune
It's called an inter-library loan. One library gets a book temporarily from another library. Happens every day.
That reminds me of a professor I had who would occasionally end a twenty minute highly detailed account of some chunk of history with the phrase "and if it didn't happen that way, it should have."
We are all just people.
My professor just cited wikipedia today in a lecture (a biology class). The article he mentioned was "really good" according to him.
Idle hands are the devil's workshop, but idle minds are much worse
instead of comming down on the students, why dont the professors log in and fix the inaccuracy!!
Wikipedia should be banned not because it contains inaccurate information (it's often highly accurate), but because it does not function in a similar way with most scholarly publications. It's a matter of methodology, not one of actual content. Students need to understand and respect the scientific method of publishing/citing etc, at least until there is a consensus that science should abandon it's current publishing practices. In that sense, wikipedia does not belong to the system. Enough discussion about wikipedia, already. It's just a web encyclopedia. We've had some great encyclopedias 20 years ago and nobody obsessed about them.
According to the Oxford English Dictonary:
history noun (pl. histories) 1 the study of past events. 2 the past considered as a whole. 3 the past events connected with someone or something. 4 a continuous record of past events or trends. addition - from my the history dept. in my HS: History, n, Written interpretation of past events In other words, history has multiple angles, to understand an event one must find as many as possible. By banning wikipedia, they eliminate multitudes of angles.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Isn't that what Citizendium is supposed to become?
I've assigned Wikipedia entries in my communication + technology class for several years now. It really opened students' eyes in terms of what wikipedia actually is. It's amazing how many don't understand that it is editable by anyone. They were fascinated by its possibilities as well as its potential pitfalls. My favorite was the student who came back a week after the assignment and said, "I entered some information and some moron came and deleted it!"
Wikipedia is a good starting point to get an overview of a subject and pointers to where more in-depth information is. Since Wikipedia is a voluntary project involving voluntary writers and reviewers, you may not get the same level of review on an article that you could reading a book edited by Springer, for example. Anyway, Wikipedia is very interesting project that should be evolving!
Funny, I thought Wikipedia was the [i]authority[/i] on Batman...
What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
The same role as any encyclopedia. As a starting point to find out general information about a subject. Only a retard would cite an encyclopedia on their thesis paper or maybe only as a general introduction to the topic that the paper is on. Something like:
Encyclopedia Britannica (or wiki or whatever) describes trench warfare as.... however recent historical evidence from... and reported by... has surfaced that shows this general understanding is a misconception. In reality trench warfare was...
then you actually use real sources and real research to show and support why the generalization accepted by the majority of the public is wrong.
This is the only way I know of that you can use sources like encyclopedias in an academic paper without receiving a major knock against you. Simply banning wiki is kinda dumb though because it can be a useful tool for stuff like I mentioned and it gives teachers an easy way to see if their students are morons.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Wikipedia articles are supposed to cite their references - many do - many don't.
If you are doing research into something that matters - rather than just wondering
if this episode of 'Monk' is one you've seen already - then by all means read
Wikipedia. Then look up the books and papers that it references - then cite those.
www.sjbaker.org
Wikipedia *isn't* a primary source. I doubt that it's even a secondary source. Tertiary or later would be more accurate.
OTOH: What *IS* a primary source? If you're an archaeologist, it's going on a dig, and it's what *YOU* dig up. Then there's what someone you know well claims to have dug up. But do notice that these primary sources are:
1) limited, and
2) not dated.
Well, in chemistry or physics, it's the experiments that you, yourself, have performed. Much more widely replicable, but the subtlties of interpretation are dictated by the texts you have read. (They *SHOULDN'T* determine the result...but I occasionally repeated experiments until I got the results that I *ought* to get.) Texts, again, are not primary sources.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of BioChemistry (at Columbia?) and he wrote an couple of articles on tracing plagerism in textbooks by the errors that they include. Textbooks seems to rarely be primary sources. (My favorite was called "The Sound of Panting". I don't know if it's currently available.)
Stephen J. Gould wrote an article on tracing the heritage of scientific articles by the metaphors that they used. I forget it's title. Again the theme was how rarely articles, books, etc. were written relying solely on primary sources.
So library books aren't primary sources either. Neither textbooks not journal articles. Some of them may be first generation copies, but you can't easily tell. And then there's the cases of scientists with reputations who make up their facts. (Medwar?)
Primary sources are definitely preferable. But when it costs a few million to run the experiment there are few students that can afford them. (I'm thinking Tevatron, etc., here.)
So the question, then, is more "How do you validate the trustworthiness of you data sources?" (After all, that's *why* primary sources are better.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Maybe teachers should do a little more research before assuming that Wikipedia is so inaccurate. After all, apparently Britannica shouldn't be used as a reference either in that case.
The fact that Wikipedia is often far better at conveying information than professors or textbooks has nothing to do with this, right? I had a professor tell me no Internet citations *period* this year, and I thought he was clearly a dumbass. You think Im searching stacks instead of JSTOR, youre an idiot...
Ideally. Practically, colleges have holes in their subscriptions to primary sources, and so does the county public library.
What about an analysis of exactly where Cliffs fucked up, complete with citations from the original text? Would that impress a professor?
When a student cites wiki and it is in error, the punishment should be work with the professor on an make up project. The project being to correct and update the erroneous wiki. If it has already been fixed, the punishment should be to work with the professor on updating/correcting/adding info to wikipedia on a topic within the class topic.
OF NOTE! The main part of this being a lesson from the teacher on fact checking and verification. Not to mention a lesson of pro-actively going out and fixing problems as you find them, versus using your apathy and indifference as a weapon.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Because it takes money and volunteers for Project Gutenberg to progress. Besides, the public domain ends abruptly at 1923, and history since 1923 is a required course in many humanities majors.
Wikimedia Foundation agrees with you.
I agree fully with wikipedia (Wikipedia:Academic use; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_us e):
> Do your research assignment properly. Remember that any encyclopedia is a starting point for research, not an ending point.
The problem is that students nowadays (want to) believe that they can find all Information in the net - and that without even logging in to the electronic Journals provided by their library. Even if you find some infromation you should not cite it in that way. The point is not accuracy, but the point is givig scientific tribute to the original authors if the work. So if you say, for example "quantum mechanics was discovered in the beginning of the last century [x]" then [x] could possibly be a reference to an overview Article which celebrates quantum mechanics hundreth birthday, but if you say "the quantization of atomic orbitals [y]", the [y] is no overvie article, no Wikipedia statement but it is somethin with 1905 in it and the name Planck.
If you find the collection of References in a Wikipedia article *particularly good* (e.g. much better, more comprehensive and more up-to-date) that the Physical Review which the Wikipedia article is based upon, you may use the term "An overview of the subject can be found in [y] and the references therein". Let me however clearly state that if the topic of your semester paper is "path integrals" I personally would not accept if a student hand me over something on path integrals where Wikipedia if mentioned, but NOT Feynmans original Paper. One other bad habit which I observed is (regarding standards) to point to some Web page, where documentation is available. If a standard (the case where I remember it was a Color Managment Standard) is so important that you mention it's name and a so central topic that you believe a citation is needed, then PLEASE: Standards have a year, a name (sometimes complex), usually a number, and very important: the organization responsible. It should be clearly visible from your Reference that Postscript was issued by Adobe (Don't cite some obscure textbook, this may cause the impression that the Adobe Postscript is just one Implementation of the language) and that, on the other hand some specific Version of C you used is ANSI compliant (so don't cite the microsoft C reference manual if you were asked to validate that a certain statement is ANSI compliant).
My recommendation: log in to you libraries electronic yournals. I can now only give this advice for Physics, but there you should as a student try to figure out which "Physical Review" (Be aware that PRL has short papers, whle PR has the long ones) covers your topic (It is very likely that there is some which does, especially in theoretical physics). Read the abstract and think about it (no connection to the net during thinking!). Can you translate it to your language (modern, more appropriate for students)? If no: look which works cite this article. Follow the most cited ones - it might be that you find the formulation [x] and articles cited therein very appropriate when you arrived at a suitable article (however if it is a 100page article, you may give the reader a hint about the section.....). Recurse this until you understand the first article.
Wikipedia is only good for finding the first article.
No more. It is a great quick resource to fish for references, names, etc. From then on, one can go to traditionally refereed/edited sources. In any case, this is not much different from any reference book you may review (you usally keep going to other specialized sources), but with the big caveat that you cannot trust it more than you would an Encyclopaedia.
And yes, I am aware that some study out there claimed Wikipedia is just as accurate. I just won't buy it.
From Idaho's Portugal,
A Man researching the sudden increase of elephant population.
As a former college prof of many years, it seems to me that any source, electronic or paper, has to be approached critically. Wikipedia is no exception, but that doesn't mean it's useless. There's been an amazing amount of BS published on paper, too.
And, yes, research should always be based on original sources. Just because those sources are in Wikipedia doesn't change that.
As the world authority on an obscure genus of ground orchids, I looked it up in Wikipedia one day on a lark. I was surprised that there was a write-up, and I was surprised at how good it was. I amplified it and fixed a few small errors (things like the precise authority of some specific names). That means, if effect, that the Wikipedia entry is the equivalent of the other authoritative sources on that genus (i.e. published works by botanists specializing in the genus).
As time goes by, and scholars recognize Wikipedia for the astonishing resource that it is, authoritative entries will become more and more common. It's as silly to reject them based on where they are as it would be to say that anything on a CD is unacceptable. What matters is how much the author knows about the subject, not the medium of publication. The professor at Middlebury would have done better to insist on use of original sources and critical thinking -- in all cases -- instead of telling students to uncritically reject Wikipedia.
That, however, would have probably entailed more work for the professor.
Bah. This is pile-on bashing of Wikipedia for no good reason. Any well-written Wikipedia article* will be appropriately referenced to reliable sources. All you have to do is look up the sources the article uses and cite those instead of the article itself. On Wikipedia, "they" are the journal of Science, the CDC, the UN, etc.
* There are 1,219 featured articles and 1,637 good articles. They are easily distinguished from the poorly-written ones, typically by the level of sourcing.
What if I'm writing a term paper on which historical leaders have appeared on the holodeck in Star Trek, or how the units of ancient armies compare tactically in Age of Empires II? Then where do I turn?
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
How come nobody mentioned it?
It is still only a secondary source though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Wikipedia_is_not_ so_great
"If you want accurate, buy the World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica encyclopedias."
Funny you should mention that. When Nature had a number of professors review articles from their (science-related) fields in WP and EB, they found that Wikipedia had fewer errors per word, as well as longer average articles. The professors picked terms in advance and then checked them in both encyclopedias, throwing out any where the EB had no article or the article length was "vastly different." (WP was not missing any of the tested articles that appeared in EB.)
See the Wikipedia page on External peer review for more.
Note: no encyclopedias are acceptable sources to cite in a research paper, regardless of accuracy. Your suggestion to only use it as a starting point is correct, but not for that reason.
I wrote many papers when I was in high school in college, and nearly every instructor gave the same warning: the internet can be a valuable guide, don't trust anything you read without something solid to back it up.
But perhaps more importantly, the information contained in any encyclopedia is usually a summary of sorts, based on information gathered from a multitude of more credible and valuable sources. A WikiPedia entry is therefore, in many ways, like a student's paper turned into a professor for grading: someone did a little research, organized their findings into a convenient arrangement, and turned it in (with the chance of the effort being rejected).
So, what role should WikiPedia play in education? As a guide, at most. A WikiPedia entry, like any good encyclopedia entry, will associate its topic with various keywords and other topics relevant to the research. And always, always check the citations!
I am in fundamental agreement...Wikipedia AND all other encyclopedias are:
/. I should say .pdfs they submit). When I read their papers, I have to take everything they say, with a grain of salt and an extremely critical eye, because it has gone through the filter of their minds. When we use Wikipedia or Britannica, etc...it increases the number of filters that potentially corrupt or distort the original data.
/. "Read the article (RTA)" (or the more vulgar equivalent) is a common refrain in comments, when someone just reads the summary and then dares to comment on it.
* great first steps in the research process
* not appropriate sources to cite in research papers
As a teacher, I expect my students to perform their own research or find primary sources as the basis for the ink and dead trees they submit (although...since this is
The same situation occurs here on
Some filters are porous and allow the data to pass through relatively unscathed, but some filters are so clogged with junk or agenda, that the real meat of the matter is distorted beyond repair.
Chalmer
Perhaps "becoming definitive" is not a desired goal. Most world renowned scholars are humble enough to accept that somebody might come along and improve / disprove their work. Referring to my original post I think that an important issue is that people should cite which version of the article they are referring to, in order to enable others to examine that particular version and its authors.
:-)
As you note well I think the issues here are the authority of the posters, and the difficulty for others to keep up to date on rapidly changing articles, whether they can be considered authoritative or not. The peer reviewed academic process is slow for a reason
A textbook is a poor replacement for research especially when it comes to history. I've seen more blatantly incorrect information in college level history books then in Wikipedia (and I'm not implying Wikipedia is anywhere near perfect). Unfortunately most professors select textbooks that support their own prejudices (many times even their own book) for the courses they teach and aren't open to any viewpoints that may be counter to those prejudices no mater how well supported.
Sir, how dare you imply that our beknighted pursuers of the truth are driven by ego and insecurity! I can assure you those sorts of bias aren't confined to history, I saw them constantly in the sciences.
For what it's worth, a textbook isn't for research in any field; they're supposed to give a rough background of the collected best-guess background knowledge in a given field. Where the textbook ends, research begins.
"Threaten to beat the librarian with your barometer if she does not obtain the required journals"
You could exert pressure and measure it at the same time. Brilliant!
Fantastic news, and I hope it starts a trend. Really, I don't men to bag on the Wiki, because I use it all the time, but I cringe every time I see it cited as an authoritative source. Can you imagine citing the wikipedia in a white paper or other professional paper? How about in a court document? If any of you feel that is appropriate, you need to get some reprogramming done. I've got a 5 lb sledge hammer that I can start the process with.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Books and journals are also occasionally in error, just like Wikipedia. To combat that problem, my professors always required us to have at least 10 sources for a major paper. While I understand the rationale for these professors' actions (I'm a professor myself), banning Wikipedia makes no sense at all. What they should do is require a number of sources, say 5-10 sources including at least one from a book, journal, and the internet. Writing a paper using Wikipedia isn't the problem. It's writing the paper using ONLY one source.
You know, I work in industry, and I'll often use Wikipedia for getting generic information. Thing is, it's generic information, and it's not always right, so after getting the generic information, I'll go talk to an engineer or someone else who can to find out what's really going on. Once in a while, the passing statement on wikipedia is exactly what I was looking for. Other times, it's a wild goose chase. The use of the site is in having a website that is already mostly right, so I can get the overview of the knowledge I need so I can go ask the right questions to verify and complete my understanding, and nothing more. Even existing in that capacity, however, it's super-useful, because without the first 10%, you can't ask the right questions to understand the other 90%.
It's been a long time.
Bravo, Middlebury! In my Honours and Advanced Placement courses in high school, we were not allowed to use any encyclopaediae as a cited work. Doing so meant that we had to rewrite our papers. University professors were more stringent -- the penalties ranged from failing the paper to failing for the semester. My teachers and professors wanted us to delve into primary sources and actually do research, rather than pulling out the old Funk and Wagnalls our parents bought at discount from Piggy Wiggly....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman