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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.
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.
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
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.
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.
You mean the Everywhere Girl is not responsible for the German bombing of Pearl Harbor?
I feel disillusioned.
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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. ;)
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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One of my professors showed everyone Wikipedia for one of our projects. He invited us to use it, particularly if our subject matter was contested or had multiple viewpoints. He showed everyone that the History tab is an invaluable research tool -- paging through all the edits can lend some insight on to various realms of thought regarding a topic and can help shape your research as much or more than just seeing the list of sources on the bottom of an article.
For instance, does your paper need to cite some evidence contrary to your paper, such as opposing viewpoints? Reverted edits or changes that were merged back out can often give you some tips on where to start or what related topics you need to look for.
But that's information archaeology. While interesting, and possibly useful, by pointing you to other (primary) sources, in the same way the main article should. The real point is that (particularly in a history department) they're teaching scholarship, which means going deeper than quoting from any encyclopaedia.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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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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.
...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
I absolutely encourage students to use Wikipedia - just not to cite it. It's a great way to find sources, but it's not a primary source. And we only want to see primary sources cited.
The best scholars have shortcuts to information. Wikipedia is such a shortcut, nicely organized. There are colleagues who frown upon any use of Wikipedia, but they are just snobs, and pissed off that they didn't have such a tool when they were grad students.
Academia contains a shocking number of small-minded people who are scared to death of their students actually learning anything. They really want to pull up the ladder behind them, would just as soon never see one of their students get a PhD. As long as they have a steady stream of cheap grad-student labor to use as research assistants, they keep the most destructive aspects of their own insecurities hidden. Fortunately, there are enough decent department heads and chairs that know this to make sure a reasonable number matriculate, and that a reasonable number of those get jobs.
There are lovely aspects of a life in academia. But there's an ugly underside, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wikipedia has a policy against being a primary source: No Original Research.
What problem-solving skills would aardvarkjoe use? I would prefer if "problem-solving skills" did not involve copyright infringement or computer network misuse. Or should "problem-solving skills" involve changing the subject, turning a report about a given topic into a report about the holes in a school's journal subscriptions?
Your inability to think of a solution does not imply that no solution exists, unless you set the criteria as "get the journal from this school library without influencing them in any way to obtain it on their own." May I suggest some solutions using a barometer?There. You now have 9 solutions which use a barometer. I am sure that, even though the school appears to be slightly underfunded, you will be able to obtain more tools than a mere barometer. I have found that telephones, friends (as available), the internet, and money work even better than barometers in many situations.
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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.