Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?

Londovir asks: "Recently, our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction. The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools. Should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?"

Comments

Absolutely.

[Z0mb1eman]

Schools should absolutely block Wikipedia and sites like Wikipedia.

In fact, schools should do one better. They should start by blocking ALL WEB SITES. Next, they should whitelist and allow only sites on which ALL the information has been verified as 100% accurate by the school staff.

This information checking should be done independently by every school throughout the nation. To avoid bias by the teachers for their favourite subjects, the fact checking should only be done by IT staff.

Further, the results of fact checking shall be collected in a centralized, proprietary database, contracted to the highest bidder. Sites shall only be added to the whitelist once they have been unanimously approved by ALL the schools.

To avoid changes to the verified content, a parallel "intranet" system shall be created with static copies of the verified pages, and only these shall be accessible by students.

Damn, I should be a school board policymaker!

Re:Manganese

[Skevin]

At a former workplace, I tried to google for "python scripting trim whitespace". The page was blocked. I asked the owner of the company (who set up the blocking software out of the box) and he responded with "Animals have nothing to do with your job. Writing screenplays have nothing to do with your job. And I definitely will not tolerate my employees looking at websites of racist organizations."

Solomon