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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?"
I would like to see the same board underline how cooperate owned news media, and human written reference material are that much more reliable that partially peer reviewed, but publicly refutable medium. I am in no way denying the obvious problems with Wikipedia.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I would expect that Wikipedia articles are on average far more reliable than the average high school American history textbook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_ Me
How about, "the faster we hit rock bottom, the sooner the mobs with pitchforks will rise up?"
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I work in a large school district IT Department. We block plenty of sites, including MySpace and Facebook, (though we don't block Wikipedia).
Generally, the feeling among us here is that if we receive a complain about a website, we will examine it. We won't block non-porn sites until we receive complaints, and the website has to have no educational value for us to consider blocking.
FanFictionRecs.net
They'll ban Wikipedia but put Of Pandas and People in their display case.
Wikipedia needs to go ahead and block all elementary and most high schools from editing the site.
Why? Most of the vandalism I have to revert comes from US elementary schools. It seems like people below a certain age simply don't have the maturity to handle the power to edit content, without vandalising it in some way. Children old enough to be able to contributed can go ahead and create accounts to edit.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Wikipedia beats the hell outta most school textbooks, heck, even college textbooks by a large margin.
Read radical news here
You could hit rock bottom a lot faster by asserting your rights, rather than waiving them.
I was explaining that while people here are debating about the good or bad ways that a school district trys to engineer students, the reason has nothing to do with engineering of students, and everything to do with the path of least resistance and least cost. Businesses work on cost-profit ratios, public services work on cost-benefit ratios. I never said it was the way it should be, I said it was the way it is.
I hate working for a public agency personally. I think we do some of the stupidest things for the most arbitrary reasons, and no one here has any focus on what our purpose is supposed to be: education. Especially in IT, which is purely administrative, we very rarely ask if we are doing something because it benefits us or the students.
FanFictionRecs.net
Our school district "blocks" sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. This provides our student body with an excellent education in some branches of computer science - like tunnelling, overseas proxy servers, and anonymous browsing in general.
Besides, to state the obvious, students generally do their homework papers at home - where Wikipedia is freely available.
Your school board should not block students from reading or viewing information no matter how it's presented. It's plain foolish, and you should find a way to make the individuals who voted this through to admit to themselves that they're manifesting their own fears of inadequacy regarding teaching and personal knowledge by trying to censor a source of information more qualified to teach than the teachers themselves. Simply put, I feel the adults are worried about the kids knowing too much.
I'm just giving a suggestion on how to get this ruling reversed when you're presenting your argument to the school board because you'll have to explain why people could be inclined to change their minds when the facts of the situation have remained the same.
Any estimate of how much "accurate information" I've accumulated from Wikipedia would be an understatement. Even during class, there have been many times that Wikipedia has been used as a supplement or reference to the lesson being taught (e.g. "I can't remember off the top of my head, but check what it says on Wikipedia and I'll explain it on the board"), and it is in this form that you could begin to have Wikipedia integrated into classroom sessions. Have the children bring up a certain page, and use the teacher as a facilitator to the students' surfing. Watch what they're reading and clarify any ambiguous statements you notice. Have a day at the beginning of the year where you explain how to use Wikipedia properly and be sure to present the different types of warnings that appear above the articles so the students can start identifying themselves where they may receive misinformation.
I have to wonder what your school board is doing to fill the void created by the absence of Wikipedia. Are they getting peer reviewed textbooks updated daily? Are they replacing the teachers' brains with a machine that contains more knowledge than any non-mechanical individual can ever hope to accumulate? Are they placing hyperlinks in every book so that kids can quickly look up a word or concept that they don't understand in order to enable them to fully understand the original concept?
Lastly, I know others have said it already, but you should realize that as far as websites go, Wikipedia is near the top in terms of accuracy of information. What's going to happen now is that instead of students using the Wikipedia search box, they'll use Google and their chances of receiving what your school board regards as misinformation increase.
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.
In your hurry to get those panties all bunched up, you overlooked the fact that "students, parents, other citizens, and democracy at large" is essentially equal to "taxpayers" in the sense he used it. He's saying that he, as a public employee, owes his employers (the public at large) the most efficient and effective use of the limited resources we as a society have collectively granted them. He didn't say "we must follow the whims and fancies of everyone who pays taxes", which appears to be the bizarre conclusion you jumped to.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This is an interesting post. I agree Wikipedia is a pretty accurate source for pure, non-filtered, information. What I don't necessarily agree with is your claims of bias - while I can see the bias toward topics that nerds are often interested in (what's with the huge amounts of articles on anime characters?), I don't see where the claim of liberal bias comes from. With regards to political topics, Wikipedia seems very unbiased, as it should, given its NPOV policy and large amounts of editors with different opinions which are moderated by each other. The result is, as it appears to me, plain facts, unprocessed by the giant propaganda machines. I think thus it's a good utility to moderate anyone's worldview, because the facts are most often less extreme than they are presented elsewhere. (Warning: I'm somewhat drunk right now, and I don't live in the US, which I perceive as being in general much more inclined toward the right in economic matters than the society in which I live.)
Lalala
Textbooks don't just feature political bias. Never mind the creationism/evolution debate, science textbooks are full of incorrect statements about noncontroversial. Like one every few pages. (College books are significantly better, but check the errata list for your favorite reference books some time.) Errors on Wikipedia can get fixed overnight, but errors in a middle school science book may mislead students for upwards of a decade.
Maybe they were just sick of writing F on papers handed in which were copied from Wikipedia, down to "[citation needed]" markers.
Of course, if they block all sites which are not credible and reliable sources of information, the decision makers won't be able to get to Slashdot to read these comments.
BTW, I don't think Helen Keller was a vocal anything...
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Hear, hear!
For example, schools are themselves an unreliable source of information, as is shown ipso facto by having them declare in a blanket way that Wikipedia is unreliable as a source of information.
But schools are what we have, so we deal with them. I don't suggest shutting them down just because they've given bad facts once in a while. No system is perfect. And Wikipedia is what we have, so we should deal with that.
I don't mean to say there aren't alternatives to Wikipedia. What I mean is that Wikipedia is the issue it is exactly because it is used, not because it is there. Many things are there that are not used, and hence not banned.
This reminds me of the debate over whether kids should be exposed to TV. I have a few friends who think they shouldn't be. It's their right, as parents, to decide for their own kids, but I also think (and I tell them when they ask my opinion) that it's extreme and ill-advised. Does TV rot minds? Probably somewhat. But probably not because of an inherent limitation of TV as much as the way in which people learn to consume it. I have little doubt that someone growing up with parents who work with them to watch TV in an informed way, using judgment about what to watch, exercising critical thought about what they see, how to timeshift, etc. is going to do better in life than someone who either hides from TV as a phenomenon or dives in and uses it without help. TV is part of our culture, and one needs to understand it to live in and around it, regardless of one's feelings about it. Teaching abstinence may sound good, but the appeal will be strong, and teaching appropriately safe practices is better for anything so compelling.
And I think the same about Wikipedia. It's a perfect opportunity to talk about objective and subjective knowledge (and even about the philosophical limits of what public education can teach one), about the practical motivations for all those references they want in your papers, about trust relationships and fraud, about truth and lying and the many gray areas between, about free speech and censorship, about cooperative social structures (from the informal Wikipedia to the formal US political system itself) and how it's hard to control them fully without strangling them (the cost of freedom, in other words), about capitalism and economics on the net (and how to shop around for info), about bias in writing (intentional and otherwise), and other things. Or, alternatively, you can just tell people that if they close their eyes, none of these issues will exist.
All in all, I personally like my education systems to be "eyes open".
Then again, this is a democracy ... one where we vote district by district on whether to believe Science or Religion ... so maybe my personal opinion will be outvoted.
As a footnote, I also wonder if the people who hold Wikipedia to such a strict standard are equally picky across the board about what students are taught in other references and other subject areas. Do they make sure the other dictionaries they use are free of hidden bias? How exactly? Do they have an approved list of newspapers that show no bias? Is CNN or Fox News their preferred TV news? How about the New York Times vs the Washington Post? Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken? And independent of media outlets, what is their standard of truth as applied in other areas? Do they teach politics? history? philosphy? media? art? economics? What do they accept as appropriately documented, unfettered truth in those areas, other than "anything not coming from Wikipedia"?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Like all things, the truth lay somewhere beneath the words. It's not inaccuracies that schools fear. I can't tell you how many times I've found the answer keys in public schoolbooks to be wrong. Misinformation is nothing new.
If anyone still thinks that public "education" is about education, they're horribly mistaken. Calculus (and nearly all mathematics) hasn't changed in 100's of years, yet schools demand new math books each year. Why is that? History, as far as I know, doesn't (and shouldn't) change... yet new books are printed each year and sold for ridiculous prices. Many contain less actual content than the previous generations before them.
Public schooling is a business and the reasons to block Wikipedia are fiscal. Publishers and curriculum planners are directly threatened by Wikipedia.
Everyone knows our schooling is broken, and everyone has the wrong idea of how to fix it. More money is not the answer (some would argue that it's the problem) nor are laptops. The system needs to be rebuilt or abolished altogether, as do most long-lived government institutions (like social security, welfare, and minimum wage).
Education isn't simply about regurgitating facts found elsewhere.
Isn't the POINT of a 'liberal' (in the academic arts sense, not the political sense) education to teach the students to reason, to be able to measure the value of the information they are getting, to filter it as necessary to draw useful conclusions?
Seems to me that Wikipedia is EXACTLY the perfect tool to teach about how information is presented and how one should read with care toward the author's biases and intent. LIKE EVERY OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION (such as encyclopedias and books), Wiki authors are generally altruistic in intent but everyone has inherent biases. Further, some are not so altruistic. With books and reference works, the recycle time is long and slow between editions. With wiki it's very fast, sometimes hours. So in a sense Wiki is the 'hothouse' version of every other reference work.
I think it's an excellent educational tool, both as a reference (cited original sources and generally good summaries of knowledge-to-date) and as a meta-example of the potential dangers of simply absorbing facts without thinking critically about their source.
-Styopa
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy."
- 1984 by George Orwell.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Schools (of all stripes, secondary/postsecondary/etc.) are already being perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be outmoded to some extent. The picture of a large, cumbersome, and reactionary institution is the picture most of us have as schools. Of course that isn't always true, but it is an ingrained part of our culture.
A move like this just reinforces that sort of a view of schools: Outdated institutions struggling to maintain a status quo. Wikipedia has its advantages and disadvantages in the realm of scholarship. But you can't just ban it, especially not nowadays. This is outright censorship of the most silly sort, and it should not be tolerated.
Schools have a responsibility to maintain some standards, and whether or not they will accept Wikipedia in papers, etc. is a decision they will have to make. But I hope they relize that by publically banning Wikipedia, they are merely raising the appeal for Wikipedia and decrease respect for their own institution.
Assuming that censorship is necessary...Of all the things the school could possibly censor, Wikipedia is one of the least justifiable to censor.
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.
I'd go further than that: yes, wikipedia is unreliable, of course it is. But it is a known quantity. If you block it, where will the students who used wikipedia for everything get there answers? Maybe from cheat sites, or from uncyclopedia, or from random blogs!
If the teacher finds the wikipedia entries related to the homework incorrect, discuss why in Class and assign students the task of improving the entries as part of their homework. Or at least of drafting new text to be discussed in class.
When the first horseless carriages were introduced, law-makers in some parts of the world required that someone walk in front of the new vehicle carrying a red flag. Part of this was because of a huge financial lobby on the part of the horse-and-cart industry (!) which in the end died out completely because of its RIAA-style stupidity, and part of it was a fear of the new technology. But even where such laws are still on the books they are now seen as representing fears of the small-minded. To be fair, thousands upon thousands of people die every year in horseless-carriage fights, so maybe really those people were right, but either way they are gone and forgotten.
The future is shaped by those who are not afraid.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
Now there is no Soviet Union to demonise there is no longer a mirror to see our own faults in. The USA and most of the Western World has become very much like the old Soviet Union, this arbitrary censorship of Wikipedia is a blatant example of this.
Interestingly we are also well on our way to becoming like our other 'enemies', currently the suicide bombing Muslim religious theocracies. Its questionable whether our religious right will be taking away the right to education and implementing other oppressions on atheists as Muslims do on religious minorities (e.g. the Bahá'í in Egypt). But it is quite possible that this is the way things will go, perhaps the ills of religious theocracies are no different from our own societies. We certainly cant spend them into submission like we did the Soviet Union, because they have the Oil.
No one has a monopoly on truth or sanity or success forever, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time - but not both. Any society has a balance between the greatest good for all and the oppression of minorities. The most worrying thing about the erosion of privacy in the West is that no one will be able to hide through obscurity any more. So if the state decides to target you, then you are doomed. This will inevitably give rise to suicidal fanaticism, doomed people have nothing to loose and could well feature in spectacular fashion on future news broadcasts.
The inheritors of the banner of sanity and moral authority in the coming century may be the Indians or the Chinese. We are currently in a golden age with only one super power that thinks it has the right to moral authority and sanity. However the USA only holds its current position because of its wealth, which will be gone by the middle of the century. Either because China will be richer or because the Oil wars will have destroyed the US economy. It will be a very different world where the Chinese are just as likely as the US to annex Saudi Arabia or Iran for the oil.
One wonders whether free speech or moral stances will have any meaning at all in that world. A pragmatic nationalism may be all that is left as opposing states nuclear weapons orbit, sparkling though our night skies.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
> If someone cites Wikipedia or sites like it gets a lower grade, ...
I wonder if they would get a lower grade if they cited Britanica, as comparison by Nature showed it was not more accurate then Wikipedia, at least in scientific matters.
My son is 12 years old. He uses Wikipedia and we encourage him. When he sees something that's not accurate he knows there's an "edit" button and he fixes it. It he's not sure he doesn't (and he knows he can raise the issue in the discussion page).
There's no such thing as "100% accurate information" (well, except perhaps the RFCeditor site, if what you claim is the "RFC says blah"). There are many mistakes in Wikipedia. E.g.,I just corrected several false "facts" in the "planar graphs" entry a few weeks ago. There are also mistakes in other sources but I cannot correct them. Does that make them more credible?
Another story: a colleague of mine (quite a few years ago) has taught a course from an old and very famous book. Some students questioned a proof and he insisted that that were the proof. The next time he openned the lecture with an apology and said that the book was wrong. And then he went on to explain that he grew up in an environment that worshipped the "word of the book" as unquestionable truth (communist Russia) so he haven't considered the possibility that the book could be wrong.
And yet another story: I know a book by a respected mathematican published by a respected publisher (AMS), that has a trivial mistake in the first theorem in page 1. There's a trivial counter example. The rest of the math in the book depends on this first theorem, so it's a whole book full of proofs that rely on a wrong fact! It's not Wikipedia. It's a peer reviewed scientific publication by an expert in the field. But it's useless for anyone except those that don't realize the first theorem is wrong. There are many examples in math of published results that turned up to be wrong.
Teaching students that no source of info can be trusted to be 100% accurate and that they can contribute themselves to inproving accuracy is a far more valuable lesson than blocking them from using peer reviewd sources like Wikipedia.
Well... I should really stop here, but just one more story:
A few days ago my 12 years old son had some assignment and the teacher provided several sources on the web (non of which was Wikipedia). One of the sources was an assignment posted by a student, and simple Google searches revealed that it was a cut & paste job from various other websites. several of the sources had large parts copied from Wikipedia...