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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?"
Then turn around and in the students' social studies classes, teach them about free speech and the horrors of censorship. Be sure to explain what rights an American Citizen has and how many people have demonstrated or fought and died for these rights to remain intact.
Then sit back and wait. Wait for the students to put this together and realize that they don't have to put up with your censorship shit.
When someone holds a demonstration, make a big deal about it and herald them for being an American Citizen. Ask the rest of the students why they waived their right to read Wikipedia as free speech. Who cares why they wanted to read it or even whether they wanted to read it all, just ask them why they waived a right they knew they had. Make them think about it.
Then, if you've got enough time, ask yourself why you've been waiving so many rights in the name of The DMCA, The Patriot Act & The Patriot Act II. Why did you waive your rights in the name of national security and the comfort of huge corporations?
Go ahead, take your time.
If you're advocating blocking Wikipedia in a serious manner, please do explain how you're going to--at the same time--teach the students about the rights they have. It will entertain me, the excuses that fascists come up with always have.
"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.
As for the person asking the question, I don't know about you but I went to a high school where the first thing we were taught is that we are responsible for the information we present in a paper. The student is responsible for citing sources & verifying that the source is reliable. If you can't do that, you're going to end up reading The Onion with either hilarious or catastrophic results. This is a valuable life lesson, let the students learn it early when the consequence is a bad grade instead of a lawsuit. If you told the students Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, give them an F if they use one single reference from it. How can they argue with you, the instructor?
My work here is dung.
Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across - after all, everything they're exposed to has already been vetted by an external body!
No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life.
That is one insightful post.
You, sir, are a genius.
You are one of the few that "gets it".
Virtually the entirety of the web (and, for that matter, a lot of the non-fiction, dead-tree books you'll find in most school libraries) are not a "credible or reliable source of information for schools". OTOH, schools ought to be teaching students to evaluate sources that have the kind of systematic problems that frequently encountered sources like Wikipedia has, and how to use them (e.g., as a gateway or refresher) to get value, and when not to use them, and not to use them exclusively. They ought not be blocking access to information on the basis that it is not up to some gold standard of reliability.
Now, there may be other valid reasons for blocking access to Wikipedia, but the reliability and credibility one is, from my perspective, pretty stupid.
(If there is a problem with students too-frequently citing—or plagiarizing—Wikipedia, the solution to that ought to be appropriate, well-communicated grading standards when it comes to appropriate sources and appropriate use and citation of those sources.)
This is ridiculous, I can't count the times Wikipedia has given me a reliable, quick and advanced source of information. If anything they should link it from the homepage.
"Oh boy"
No matter how poor a source Wikipedia may be (and in a moment I'll address that), it should be the decision of the classroom teacher whether and how to accept it as a legitimate source, just as the classroom teacher is the arbiter of whether a citation from Weekly World News counts for as much as one from the New York Times. It is the classroom teacher who should be the one explaining the difference to the students.
Second, we all know that Wikipedia is often an excellent first source of basic information on a topic. Me, I've got a Ph.D. and a book published with a university press, and I constantly refer to Wikipedia to ground myself in things. Which is not to say I'd cite it as an authority. Again, it's the classroom teacher whose responsibility it is to explain the difference.
I expect this is the first of about 1000 comments that will make essentially the same points. I hope that some sense of this can be conveyed to the school board in question.
I swear, Funk and Wagnall's, Britannica, and World Book must be stepping up with the lobby money. This isn't the first time I've read about the "inaccuracy" of Wikipedia recently.
Regardless of whether the information is accurate or not, Wikipedia is an excellent source because many times it has references listed a student can use as a basis for his/her own research. Teachers should not allow any type of encyclopedia to be used as a source, since, its supposed to be generalized knowledge on a subject. In fact, a great feature of Wikipedia is that editors have the ability to post a warning on an article stating that it needs to be cleaned up or that references need to be found to support the article.
Banning Wikipedia doesn't accomplish much. Encyclopedias, even in their paper form, have never been the most accurate sources for information. Compare a World Book article to a Britannica article on the same subject, and there will be notable differences. It all depends on the author, and the sources used to write the article.
I've found entries in Wikipedia on topics I have not found anywhere else, and many times followed an external link to a site that has more information on the topic. It would be a shame to take that ability away from students.
Wikipedia is probably not that different in accuracy from the textbooks most schools in the U.S. are using. Here's the deal: teachers need to teach critical thinking more than rote memorization of facts. If they're not teaching kids to question the textbooks (and the teachers themselves!), then they're already guilty of what they're afraid of using wikipedia would do.
:)
Wikipedia is *great*, as is the web and internet in general, for nothing more than bringing up aspects of a topic that someone wouldn't suspect even existed. Check out a topic on wikipedia and notice aspects of a topic that wouldn't occur to you - then research those aspects using whatever sources you want.
The advantages of Wikipedia far outweigh any data inaccuracies - that it's constantly updated, and has a far wider range of viewpoints being represented than any textbooks.
If you teach critical thinking to the kids, then you downplay wikipedia's weaknesses while leaving the strengths.
IMO, though, so think about it for yourself.
because googling will offer much better accuracy-
just read the cites on wikipedia and find the books yourself, dont cite wikipedia.
If you're going to start keeping students away from sources of misinformation you're probably going to have to fire a lot of teachers.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
You're missing why the students are willing to give up their right to wikipedia: if teachers can't check wikipedia at school it's much harder to notice that they just copied their paper from wikipedia :P
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Generally, school librarians make the decision what reference sources are available based on a school collection development policy, curriculum, and available funds. Not school board members. There's also a difference between making available print and electronic resources, which cost money, and arbitrarily deciding to block access to Internet sites that are considered educational in nature but not to others.
Blocking access to one source of information and not to others is setting a particularly poor example on how to evaluate the source of information. Many Wikipedia articles are very well-written and contain citations that back up the research. I'd like to see some of the news stations do the same.
Usually there's some sort of challenge policy available for books in a school library. I don't see how reviewing a ban on Wikipedia would be any different. If I were a parent in that school district, I'd be over there asking about challenging that decision under the same policy.
Geeze, it never ceases to amaze me the chest-thumping some people do about their rights, without even knowing what those rights are. They think their amendments apply to anything except the government, and gives them some right to troll a board or to read Slashdot/Wikipedia/whatever at work/school/whatever.
Learn your _real_ rights, lemming, because believing in such stupidities is how you lose those rights. Since you ask that, yes, ask yourself why so many rights were so easily taken away. Because 90% of the population doesn't even know them. They think the constitution gives them a right to troll a privately own message board, or to slander the neighbour, or to cheat on WoW, or whatever. Joe Random Voter doesn't even comprehend that those rights, or that they apply to the government (au contraire, he thinks his free speech applies to everything _but_ his government), or what they really were supposed to protect. He's too busy exercising his imaginary rights, to care about the _real_ ones.
Here's the actual first amendment text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Get this:
- It's about laws passed by Congress. Wake me up when Congress makes a law that forbids you to say something at all, not when an IT department blocks Wikipedia on their network. I don't see anywhere there that students are forbidden to read Wikipedia at home, or that police will take anyone to Guantanamo for reading Wikipedia. Just that it's blocked on the school network. That's it.
- It's _only_ about your relationship to the Congress and laws. It doesn't mean anyone else than Congress should have _any_ obligation to you. Not even public schools or government departments owe you jack shit on their premises or network. Whether it's free speech, or the right to peacefully demonstrate, or to petition for redress, get this: noone else has an obligation to provide you with the means or time for it. Your boss or school do not have to participate in a demonstration, don't have to pay for your bandwidth to exercise your free speech, nor let you spend your work/class time surfing the net. They don't have to do _anything_ for you. It doesn't even say they can't fire you for it.
- "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. It just says that noone will lock-up the Wikipedia owners for being anti-Bush. It does _not_ say that anyone has an obligation buy and deliver the New York Times to your doorstep, or Wikipedia to your desktop. If your boss or the school principal doesn't want to carry those packets to you, tough shit, it's up to you to get them in your free time.
- sorta unrelated, but that's another confusion that chest-thumpers do: no, it also doesn't mean anyone has to publish or carry your speech either. If you want to see your stuff in print, buy a newspaper. If you want them on a server, buy a server. And if the IT department doesn't route your precious corrections to Wikipedia, tough shit, get your own Internet connection at home.
And spare me the emotional demagogue bullshit about people who died for those rights. Get this: noone fought for your right to have the company's/school's/whatever IT department carry your packets.
And no, aggression, isn't a substitute for competence, btw. Just calling everyone who might disaggree a "fascist" preemptively, doesn't excuse you for not having a clue what you're talking about.
Geeze...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking??? Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations. It is precisely the free and open access to information that we in the USA enjoy (and that China lacks) that makes this country and our students some of the most creative and imaginative in the world. NEVER destroy that freedom!
Wow. You take my breath away. How does one respond to such an incredible warping of the purpose of school? What the hell do TAXPAYERS have to do with it?
I thought school was supposed to be about the education of students, for their benefit, that of their parents, of other citizens, and of society and democracy at large.
Not that I think schools actually do this; I would say on balance they achieve the opposite. But to actually state that the goal of public education is the efficient satisfaction of taxpayers (not citizens, parents, or God-forbid students; learning, citizenship, and the improvement of students are nowhere to be found) is so ass-backwards it's virtually guaranteed to never achieve actual education or fulfill the interests of students.
Of course, to the extent that you're a politico or functionary dependen on an industrial system of public education for your power and income, your characterization of education may be in your personal interest. What you wrote thoroughly confuses the private benefit of public servants with the broader public interest. I sincerely hope this is an accident of your writing and a product of having to cope with an imperfect system, not what you actually believe or practice.
None of which is to argue that schools are better with or without MySpace. Addressing that question requires a much more thorough analysis than the caricature you've presented here: of what we as a society want our schools to achieve, of the degree to which school should be isolated from real life and of the practical questions of how school can teach students to function in their actual lives, of whether it's better to try to change the student than to train the teacher, of the potential and actual nature of social sites (socialization is, after all, one of the main things we want out of schools), and of the practical dimensions of any relevant policy. In other words, I don't have an answer but I don't think you've made an argument.
Teachers and other academics often see themselves as the gatekeepers to knowledge; it should come as no surprise to anyone that when a new technology comes along which threatens this gatekeeper role, schools and educators start talking about banning the technology. Wikipedia is a disruptive technology when it comes to education, and the arguments against it amount to little more than smoke-screens and academic arm-waving. When you think about it, the arguments against Wikipedia always boil down to a lack of academic credentials for the people who create and edit Wikipedia articles, plus a propensity for young students to cut & paste Wikipedia articles into their own papers instead of doing real research. The first argument, lack of credentials, is the easiest to dismiss.
Through Wikipedia, unlike what you see in a typical school textbook, readers can always find out exactly who edited which articles, and in many cases, they can follow the discussion on the talk pages about why people think some information should be included in an article or, conversely, why some information should be excluded. Overall, those two features represent a massive boost to both the credibility and reliability of the factual knowledge contained in the Wikipedia. Edit pages and talk pages open the door for everyone to see how the knowledge in the Wikipedia is created and distilled. If Wikipedia editors held academic credentials, it might make it easier for us to accept that the facts contained in the articles are true, but credentials themselves don't have any direct bearing on the truth or falsehood of any given fact. Wikipedia, just like any other potential source of factual knowledge, should always be taken with a grain of salt. Academics can make mistakes just like anyone else and, on occasion, they've been known to distort or misrepresent facts based on a personal or a political agenda. Facts become facts when we have wide-spread agreement on the truth of certain statements. Wikipedia fosters this process of building consensus and agreement -- traditional textbooks sure as hell do not.
The second argument educators like to make against Wikipedia is that students find it easy to plagerize using Wikipedia, or that many students simply rip facts out of Wikipedia articles without doing any real research to check the validity of those facts. To this argument I'd just like to point out that the same kind of student laziness existed well before Wikipedia came on the scene, and Wikipedia is not to blame because some students prefer to game the system instead of learning what the schools are trying to teach. Hell -- I think a way to solve this problem would be to have students write original Wikipedia articles instead of useless, overly redundant term papers. At least then, student's work would actually amount to something useful, and their efforts might contribute to the overall scope of knowledge. As it is now, term papers are pretty much make-work, which may be one of the reasons why some students don't want to put forth do more than a minimum amount of effort in writing them. If students had to create original Wikipedia articles, I would image that they'd be forced to go and do some real fact-gathering and writing, which is exactly what the schools are trying to teach with term papers, right?
J. K. Rowling had some good commentary on the idea of school administrators trying to censor what information sources the students are allowed to read, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the highly dislikeable Dolores Umbridge, put in charge of Hogwarts by the incompetent and fearful government of the wizarding world, issued a series of edicts including a ban on students reading a tabloid newspaper that had just published a lengthy article about student Harry Potter, who was on Umbridge's bad side at the time. Naturally, once it was banned it became the most popular reading matter all over the school.
--Dan
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As a high school student, I might be able to provide some insight into this. A lot of people know that Wikipedia and such are not acceptable sources, those that don't learn quickly. There's about a 90% chance that anyone after the first half of their freshman year who cites Wikipedia just doesn't care, or is trusting their luck that their teacher won't notice (Has happened once or twice, not a lot though). If someone cites Wikipedia or sites like it gets a lower grade, though by how much depends on the teacher.
In any case, "Inappropriate" sites are blocked (Myspace, pr0n, etc.), but Wikipedia is wide open. Anyone with any technical skill can get around the filter, though, so it's pretty effective, but enough people know how to that if they did something like block Wikipedia, it'd be useless anyway.
One of the things Wikipedia is good for is finding links to more reliable sites, and finding books to look up, as you said, at the library.
As soon as every teacher is more credible than Wikipedia, go ahead.
People forget why we do education. It's not to have kids write good, well referenced essays - it's to teach them HOW to write good, well referenced essays. Without doubt, Wikipedia is an insanely valuable resource - but you have to know how to use it.
So let's train our children to live in a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available from a single site on the web - but you can't 100% trust what it says. Merely blocking access to it does nothing - worse than nothing in fact because just as soon as they get out into the real world where Wikipedia ISN'T blocked - they'll use it uncritically because they've never been taught to use it right.
For things that don't matter much - just use it - and 99 times out of 100 it's right. For things that DO matter - by all means read Wikipedia - but use it to find the primary references that you CAN trust. Then look those up and reference them. But that's what you've got to do with any encyclopedia - there are just as many (arguably more) errors in Encyclopedia Britannica - and I don't think that's been banned yet.
This is no different from the technological challenges of earlier generations. When I was a kid in the early '70s, the pocket calculator was just starting to take over from the slide rule. The school found that the lack of the need to figure out where to put the decimal point (which a calculator does automatically - but the slide rule does not), we were not estimating the value of the result in our heads - so if we made a keying mistake on the calculator, we could easily be miles from the correct answer and not know it. Nowadays, all kids use calculators and slide rules are pretty much museum pieces - we got over this 'problem' with calculators and taught people to realise the possibility of a keying error.
The same needs to happen for the ENTIRE Internet - not just Wikipedia. It's ludicrous to block Wikipedia - and not block any of a gazillion other information-providing sites. Most of those are created by a single individual who could just as easily be wrong as Wikipedia. We need to train kids to recognise what web-based information can be trusted and what must be double-checked before we can trust it.
www.sjbaker.org
Yes let's block Wikipedia, because of the possibility of misinformation. //10.0.0.1/library/sourceofallknowledge
Let's also block forums discussing any such information due to the possibility of student's receiving misinformation.
Let's also block any sites which have any information which disagrees with the school's policies.
Let's also block sites which disagree with the policies of people or governments we are directly associated with.
Let's force student's to use a specially crafted search engine to remove such misinformed sites given by other search engines such as Google (This has actually happened).
Let's block every site and only allow sites which match our policy.
Let's remove our internet connection and simply have an intranet filled with all our correct information which has been checked by the school to be correct, and of course, the school is the source of all knowledge of everything that is correct and right. After all, it has to be true; I found it out at http:
Is something written on paper better reviewed, researched or accurate. Most schools libraries are underfunded and out of date.
The answer is that unlike Wikipedia, books have known authors (and I'm talking about factual books here), known publishers and editors who are answerable for errors of fact, and do not change moment by moment in response to ignorance, prejudice, "the wisdom of crowds" or whatever bullshit arguments are used including appeals to "community", appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, appeals to bizarre and slippery concepts like NPOV, "notability" or anything else.
That isn't to say that books are perfect or that they are not in need of revision and update, but its a whole lot better than the spectacular MMORPG of human knowledge known as Wikipedia.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
One of the things Wikipedia is good for is finding links to more reliable sites, and finding books to look up, as you said, at the library.
Wikipedia is a perfectly valid source of research information if it is coroberated by other sources JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE. The encyclopedia may be wrong, the textbook may be wrong, the dictionary may be wrong, books in the library may be wrong, and wikipedia may be wrong. In all probability they won't all be wrong.
If the schools aren't teaching students about fact checking and judging the reliability of a source, they are failing. Unfortunatly, that is exactly the case. That's why adults, after 12 years of schooling, still can't see through all of the political lies out there, spot bias in media or even realise that commercials are full of crap.
The better approach would be for schools to actually do their jobs and provide students with a solid foundation in fact checking and then ENCOURAGE them to consider wikipedia as a potential source. Any research paper that relies on a single source, no matter what that source is, should lose points. The only exception is cases where there is only one source. In that case, the paper should reflect an appropriate skepticism.
These are skills that every single person needs to have if they are to participate meaningfully in our democracy or in our economy. Simply blocking Wikipedia and teaching a doctrine of encyclopedic infallibility is a huge failure.