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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"
There seems to be this prevailing opinion among schools that the information on wikipedia is of such poor quality as to be considered outright lies. Yes there is some mis-information present on wikipedia, but the same could be said of virtually any source of information. Wikipedia, like any source should be cross-referenced with other sources, but it also serves as an excellent initial source of information, and is often one of the most up to date sources you can find. In reference to modern events, both political, and scientific, it represents the best resource short of dedicated peer journals (which are often hard to find, and even harder to search). Finally, censorship of any kind on the internet, particularly in schools which are usually understaffed and poorly designed in terms of IT is a joke that can be easily circumvented by students with basic computer skills and motivation to do so.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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
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.
Yep, blocking it is stupid. But you should be reminding the kids that anyone can post anything on the Internet.
So just wrap a frame around the Wikipedia pages with the words "Any doofus can put anything up on the Internet. Don't be dumber than the doofus."
"only if they also block FOX, CNN and MSNBC"
Seriously, is wikipedia any more correct or incorrect than any other source of information.
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!
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Seriously, it's not like they didn't give you a easy way to verify if something is credible.What investigation? The citations are right on the page.
If they aren't there, one is better off looking at other sources for information.
Perhaps the schools should buy some accounts for the entire school to access sites like Britannica? -- I get the feeling they're too cheap to-do so.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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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They'll ban Wikipedia but put Of Pandas and People in their display case.
even though this is the wrong way to teach information literacy.
Part of me wants to say that if you block the Wikipedia, you really should have a simple white list. These are the sites you are allowed to visit, because we've checked them out and they are reliable.
But the thing is, the Wikipedia really is extraordinarily useful. And therefore very, very easy to misuse. Overall the Wikipedia is remarkably reliable. In a some cases its pretty mediocre, and obviously in a few cases it can go horribly, terribly wrong.
Overall, its a tremendous benefit to have Wikipedia. But you have to bring a skeptical attitude or you can get burned. The truth is you really ought to bring a skeptical viewpoint to the Wikipedia, but many schools aren't in the business of teaching skepticism. Knowing how to handle a site like Wikipedia is part of media literacy. You should use same skills you would use to evaluate a network news show, or a book, your American History textbook, or even an "official" encylopedia.
So, what this really amounts to is admission that the school is not prepared to teach its students critical reading. They really ought to teach that, but if they can't, then students might in some cases be lead wildly astray by Wikipedia. Perhaps for this sort of school, a white list would be better, or maybe even just giving up on net access altogether.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
schools block wikipedia's access to students.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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.
They should not block Wikipedia, for sure, but if the child gets something wrong from their research, they should be marked down since they didn't do their research properly. Even Encyclopedia Britannica can be wrong- if they find a discrepancy between two sources, they should be required to investigate additional sources until they at least gather a consensus, and properly attribute it. Making a single observation and declaring it the absolute truth is faulty science, no reason that online research should be any different.
If a student turns in a research paper citing Wikipedia they should get an F-.
Yep, because things like World Book are _bastions_ of good information*.
*(Yes, this is an excerpt from the actual World Book Encyclopedia(TM) that I grew up with... absolutely no propaganda there... nope, not none.)
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
I mean, it would be a shame if students could just go to some other site that carried the exact same articles.
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
The stupidity of schools and teachers is sometimes truly amazing. Bad luck that it is idiots like these who are supposed to actually teach others.
But thanks for asking, asking even the most stupid question is a beginning: no you should not block Wikipedia. No you should not encourage using it. No you should, in general, not give the impression that everything can be solved by a simple rule.
You should do what teachers are supposed to do: give students the means and ability, the knowledge and the judgment to decide by and for themselves on a case to case basis when it might be a good idea and when not -- and why.
Maybe work that into your biology and politics classes. Demonstrate. Discuss.
In a word: use your brain, for a change.
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!
as a resource Wiki is not as 'safe' a source of information as a reviewed textbook, if the facts in Wiki are wrong and there are exam questions which the student gets wrong because of Wiki, who is to blame? I wouldn't portray Wiki as evil, but as it is, a database of information submitted by the community and it maay be true, false or otherwise.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Wikipedia is blocked as it may contain inaccurate information?
But you're not blocking the rest of the internet that can contain anything, from anybody and is subject to no review at all?
Maybe in the board's concern they should extend their block to any site that's ever reported incorrect or disputed information - this would cover pretty much every site in existence - religion, politics, history blah blah.
Whilst Wikipedia shouldn't be taken as gospel (well actually they gospels shouldn't be taken as gospel either, but I digress), if you dip beneath the front page and examine the edits it actually allows you to see most sides of the debate on most topics.
If teachers now are anywhere near as incompetent as they were when I went to school, they're still the best source of outright lies, insults, and propaganda out there. I mean, c'mon, do I have to invoke Godwin's law here? Most "teachers" are barely competent in the subjects they're supposed to teach, and many of them were openly antagonistic when someone tried to correct them. On a scale of Wikipedia to Hitler, teachers are awfully close to Hitler. You can't correct them, no matter how wrong they are. When they start going on tirades about the unrelated topic of their choice, there's nothing anyone can do. Trust me, if I learned history from Wikipedia instead of from school teachers, I would have learned a few dates and not the names of a few sports teams.
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.
The should block Wikipedia from both student and teachers.
They should not cave in to pressure from teachers or parents, they should stick to their guns.
Because the students need first get used to being screwed by then man. And second and more importantly, they need to learn to subvert the system while they're young; it will help them in the real world.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
There's a reason why history grads often go on to very successful careers in apparently completely unrelated fields: It's because a good education in history is an education in thinking.
I didn't follow it through to university level but I still value one specific history class I took as the most important part of my education.
Studying World War II history, we weren't taught to memorize the dates of the outbreak of war, the dates of the conferences between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and a bunch of other statistical but semi meaningless information when taken out of context.
Instead we were taught to look at the different sources, to embrace the fact that German propaganda ministry materials were biased, look at the just as biased British accounts of the time, the histories written (as Churchill said) by the victor after the event, form our own conclusions about where the truth likely lay and still appreciate the value that the slanted perspective would have had on the respective populations.
By understanding the broader picture, not only did I find a hell of a lot more interest in the period but I also got taught how to think independently, to analyze sources and form my own opinions.
Wikipedia isn't a perfect source of truth. Then again, most textbooks that cover their nation's wars with another country aren't either.
In an ideal world, you teach students how to assess the truth of what they're told, how to think and how to form their own opinions.
Unfortunately, America seems hell bent on raising children that believe the sanctioned news source is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When they grow up and start watching something like Fox News as their source of truth, look at the wonderful mess a country that had no idea about the real facts can get in to when the majority of voters think what they're told to and need four years of death and a demolished "liberated" country to make them stop and question.
Now imagine what would have happened if the average American had learned in highschool to listen to what Fox was saying, flick over to the Daily Show for a humorous counter, go on line to a non American news source like the BBC for a third perspective, then Wikipedia for a potentially somewhat inaccurate but still useful grounding in the region's politics and history.
Sure, they might reasonably have concluded Iraq had chemical weapons - after all, we still had the recepits from when we sold them to them in the 80s. They might have weighed up the national interest and judged it higher than the concerns voiced elsewhere in the world. I don't care whether they would have agreed with me or not - but at least they would have thought rather than spat venom at anyone being "unpatriotic," leaving all rational thought at the door.
So, in short: A source doesn't have to be accurate to be valuable. Often, in learning to appreciate the inaccuracies, we learn vastly more. If nothing else, at least we engage our brains - which seems like a good thing to encourage school children to do if you're going to call yourselves educators.
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.
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
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
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?
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.
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
Web Tips
No, they're not the same. Partly for technical reasons (students don't pay taxes, for example, immigrants do but aren't citizens, and so forth), but more importantly because these are different roles people fill, and because language matters. Casting the debate in terms of "taxpayers" introduces an immediate bias, just as casting it in terms of "education" introduces a different (and in my opinion appropriate) bias. Words matter, as anyone from folks involved in the same-sex marriage debate to George Orwell can tell you. See my response to another post on the topic.
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.
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.
As soon as every teacher is more credible than Wikipedia, go ahead.
Actually, there is a secure connection, which, depending on the type of block, can be used to access Wikipedia; also with a poor connection. And there are always open proxies, if only for reading Wikipedia, not editing it (open proxies are blocked for various reasons). Draco would be proud.
Reading through the comments here, I see lots of divisiveness, but little actual grasp of reality. 1) Reliability of wikipedia. My litmus test for an encyclopedia is the Tesla/Marconi test. Look at the entries for Marconi and Tesla. If it says that Marconi invented radio, then it's not a reliable source. If it says that Tesla did, it's reliable. This is a point of fact that was settled by the SCOTUS about 60 years ago. Wikipedia gets it right. Most printed encyclopedias I have checked get it wrong. (I used to work for a school district, and part of my duties were to receive in books. I had *lots* of chances to check encyclopedias). 2) 'Learning' is not about regurgitating accepted information. It's about gaining the skills to understand and discriminate good information from bad. Part of the way that a person gains these skills is by occasionally doing the wrong thing and getting corrected. A school district which lays out a policy which (in effect) says 'You may only cite sources of which we approve', is not allowing students the chance to make mistakes--and thereby learn. They are also eliminating the concept of contesting data. (see the following point) 3) Approved sources vs. authoritative sources. When I was in high school, I took a class on WWII. I read the approved textbooks and the approved stories of what happened. As part of the class, I interviewed a WWII veteran--in this case, my father. When comparing the approved text's description of what happened at Monte Casino, and my father's description of what happened, there was a huge disparity. One version was written by historians, peer reviewed, edited, and accepted by the school district. The other version was from someone who was actually there at the time it happened. Which would *you* believe? In school we are taught (by authoritative sources!) that George Washington's teeth were wooden (False-- they were ivory), that Marconi invented the radio (False--it was Nicola Tesla), and that American bravery resulted in the capture of Monte Casino (False--it was the devious and brutal actions of the Sikhs that causes a German surrender). I'm not sure about the last one, but I know that Wikipedia gets the first two correct, where the approved sources get them wrong. The administrations who ban Wikipedia (and other online resources) on the basis of 'validity', are prejudiced. They think that anything in print is, somehow, magically endowed with veracity. Those administrations are wrong. The truth of the matter is that *all* sources of information should be questioned. They should be bounced against other sources and both the similarities and discrepancies should be considered and weighed for value. But schools aren't interested in that. They aren't interested in teaching kids how to think, because teachers aren't rewarded on how well students criticize 'conventional wisdom', and critical and independent thinking doesn't show up well on standardized tests. And before anyone shouts me down, I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has been on the teaching side of academia--as both a teacher and an administrator--for the better part of 20 years. As a teacher, I welcomed *any* source that could be justified. I will set one instance of 'My dad was there' against a thousand established encyclopedias and history texts.f Wikipedia is full of experts, and they have to defend themselves--constantly--against a host of counter arguments. If that isn't the epitome of peer review, I don't know what is. Oh... and for those who say that sites such as MySpace have no value? Have you seen how many politicians are explaining their platforms via MySpace blogs and profiles? That sounds pretty authoritative to me.
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
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
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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:
School boards are dinosaurs, positions are filled by elections that are about popularity and political persuasion. Most people know little about the qualifications of board candidates. Many board candidates take the positions for prestige or to grind axes. Many know little or nothing about education. Many are rubber stamps for a Superintendent.
The people on this board clearly fit the bill. Most probably know little about Wikipedia except what they've been told, some probably don't have a net connection. What they've been told is has probably been filtered to serve a political agenda rather than an educational one.
Wikipedia, for all of it's problems, is a remarkable resource. It's especially remarkable because it can be edited by anyone, including high school students. If I were still teaching, I'd encourage my students to find and improve the quality of articles they are interested in. They'd learn from that, and instead of having it thrown in the wastebasket, the whole world could benefit from their work. The class could look at each chosen article, criticize it, and possibly work in small groups to tackle problems.
But no. The dinosaur has spoken.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I think I'll file this thread with these related ones:
48% of Americans Reject Evolution
US No Longer Technology King
Now please don't you burst my bubble and tell me that this [idiotic] school isn't US based.
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).
So even after Taking calculus and philosophy courses for many years now I'm still appalled at how many people who teach put form over substance. I mean it's hard enough to get students to really learn or do anything but blindly follow algorithmic directions without making it worse. Now you are going to give them the message that 'No, that's not the right way to learn about something.' I mean what better way could you find to grind home the message that learning isn't important; only following the arbitrary rules is important. Jesus Christ if this was April fools I would be sure this was a joke. I mean is wikipedia totally 100% accurate, of course not. Is it more accurate than asking your teacher? Probably. Both having been a student for some time and now having TAed I'm fully prepared to say that teachers are totally human and even the best of them get confused about things, misremember or otherwise give the wrong answer from time to time. Does it follow that we should ban teachers as well? Obviously not because teachers, despite being poor authoritative references, are quite useful to help students learn. The same goes with wikipedia. The situations are no different. You would take off points for a student who quoted the teacher in his term paper and you can do the same with wikipedia. I used to believe all that stuff about people resenting wikipedia because it undermined the traditional authorities was total BS. After incidents like this I find myself questioning that conclusion. Of course most likely this is motivated by the uncomfortably of teachers with this new technology and new ways of doing things but still it's totally amazing.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Wait a second... you're saying that a high school student doesn't have the cognitive skills to process Wikipedia?
I can't see what possible advantage there could be to denying children access to information. The downside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio and giggle a bit. The upside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory and develop an interest in theoretical economics (or mathematics, or evolutionary biology). Or maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieche and think a bit about philosophy. Allowing fear of the former to prevent the possibility of the latter is a terrible tradeoff. And yes, with the amount of time students spend in school they'll have some free time to surf the web on their own - that's good, not bad.
Sure, you can't rely on students teaching themselves. But, to act to directly prevent it is utter madness. Everyone is at least somewhat self taught - trying to take that away will produce significantly less functional human beings.
Someone already posted this, but it can't be overemphasized: I'm sure that Encyclopedia Americana was still available in the school library. If not, I'm sure that they wouldn't confiscate it if you brought a copy to school.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
At my school, it seems to be a general idea that Wikipedia cannot be used as a source of information due to it's possible inaccuracy. However, students including myself are smart enough to think for themselves and use the view the sources OF the wikipedia article and see what those have to offer us. We don't have to cite wiki, and we still get the same information. Eventually you could do this until you ended up at the original source anyway, just have to backtrack until you get a legitimate source.
Which is still a different thing from what I'm saying there. Yes, kids still have civil right. No, the right to have wikipedia accessible on the school network, is _not_ a civil right.
If someone decreed that school kids are forbidden to talk about Wikipedia, or to read Wikipedia even at home, _then_ you'd have a violation of their civil rights. If someone was expelled for contributing to Wikipedia at home, then you'd have a civil rights violation. If someone mandated nanny software to keep homes with kids away from Wikipedia, then, yeah, you might have a civil rights problem.
Its being blocked by the school's proxy? No, it's not a civil rights violation. It's just how the packets are routed on one particular network, really, not some global interdiction. And certainly noone proposed to seize and search the kids' homes/laptops/pdas/whatever either.
Plus, what all this "auugh, censorship is evil" whine misses is: the school simply does not have any constitutional obligation to be a general-purpose ISP. They just aren't one. They just have to teach. They give you the materials to use, or access to them, and are allowed to make judgment calls as to what sources they allow. If they decide that you can't quote the Bible on your biology term paper, or Wikipedia on the history paper, that's that. If they decide you're not allowed to pull out a Bible and read it during math class, or that you're not to surf Wikipedia during whatever class, that's that too. You can still read either at home, just not during class.
They're not even supposed to be some global gateway to all information. They have a very narrowly defined list of stuff they have to teach. And if you want to study something else, or with other materials, tough shit, you'll have to do it at home on your own time. You can't demand that your primary school teacher helps you study quantum mechanics, or that the school library must get a copy of whatever book just for you. If they don't have it, tough luck, you'll have to get it on their own. Their not offering a particular book or web page isn't censorship, since noone forbade you to read it at home.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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
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
"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
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.
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
If you are going to say "Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools..." you might as well say that school boards should also be banned from making decision since they are user created and edited and are composed of a bunch of windbags making unsubstantiated claims. Indeed so many educational decisions are made in a presence of a lot of peer reviewed literature showing their policies to be failed ones. But of course no-one challenged them there.
Did they do a study to show that Wikipedia is so much worse than other sources of information at the school?
As someone who has used Wikipedia a lot I can say that it is a valuable source of information. There are not too many other websites that you can use as a starting point to research a topic. A lot of the time there is way more information than Encyclopedia Britannica or anywhere else. Firstly you can corroborate the claims it makes. There is a great effort going on to cite sources that you can check.
Secondly when there are errors they tend to get cleared up. Articles are constantly edited. In fact you might call Wikipedia the Most Peer Reviewed journal in the world. Thirdly quite often one finds out information from Wikipedia that one would not have been aware of because being aware of it would require having done a PhD in the subject. Yet some important details can put a whole subject into perspective.
If I want to know about some subject quite often simply googling it provides very little. I have often gone into a library and asked a librarian for some books on some subject and unless I can tell them the title they are very often unable to recommend me one. Recently I was looking for information on public ownership of the airwaves. Well Wikipedia helped to start the project rolling. It often helps to index a lot of information on the Internet.
I also winder what is so great about allowing newspaper access. The press exaggerates or misunderstands things all the time. Why don't we ban them? Is Britannica peer reviewed? Nope it isn't. Neither is the New York Times. The schools should be teaching students how to critically analyze information. When they see a claim so they see an argument justifying it? Is the argument internally consistent? Does it source its information? Can you look up the source? Is there contradictory evidence elsewhere? Indeed if schools could use Wikipedia to home such skills further enhancing students' education.
To me this represents an attack on authority. The Schoolboard and indeed many other institutions need the façade of authority to get by. Wikipedia represents a meritocracy as opposed to arbitrary authority. And schools quite often despite what they say do not want free thinking students questioning everything.
Three issues:
In fact, come to think of it, every time I've cited Wikipedia in a paper, I've gotten an A on it. Better, for some of those papers I've received "course citations" -- special notes of positive recognition which are recorded on my transcript. One other professor made a point of stopping me and saying, "This is really a very good paper. Could you make an extra copy of it for me?" I call that success, n'est-ce pas?
I don't just cite Wikipedia, of course. I cite academic papers too. But those papers often don't spell out the basics -- so as an undergrad trying to apply more advanced math, I need some background, and Wikipedia provides that. (Textbooks would too, but it's quicker to go to the Wikipedia article -- and the Wikipedia article is often just as useful if not more). So in the spirit of full disclosure (and the Academic Honor Code), I cite all my sources. That means that, if I need to figure out how the Quaternions work and Wikipedia tells me, I cite Wikipedia.
Admittedly, I'm not researching history or some politically-loaded subject. I'm researching something which benefits from Wikipedia's huge nerd bias. Wikipedia is much more than an encyclopedia: Will I find a complete description of the quaternions in the Encyclopedia Brittanica? What about particle filters? How about the naive Bayes classifier or the ensemble Kalman filter? Wikipedia has those articles! If I go to the article titled State space (controls), Wikipedia goes so far as to show the nonlinear state-space model for a pendulum. I am sure Brittanica doesn't give that.
Librarians keep insisting that people use the Internet as we used Old Media. But it just doesn't work the same. What if some guy on the gamedev.net forum helps me out by sharing an idea with me; should I not cite him? I make a point of including proper footnotes, even for sources like that. Then, it's up to me to make that source authoritative -- by doing a correctness proof in the paper, for example. It takes a little legwork -- but if you immediately write off sources of information like that, you ignore most of the power of the Internet that Old Media lacked. Random, unpublished people know a lot of stuff. You need to verify it often, but it's still useful (and "verification" doesn't necessarily mean "appealing to authority"). As many posters have said, it sometimes just takes critical thinking.
As the original poster, I can tell you the following.
After sniffing around a little and making some inquiries of people who are in a higher position within the county, I think I've finally found out the "true" reason for this. I was told that, since our school board has paid a hefty access rights cost to World Book Online, it was decided to remove access to Wikipedia. It seems that some higher-ups were upset that they've shelled out the money for students to use an online encyclopedia, and that practically no one was using it! So, rather than investigate why people wanted to use Wikipedia so much more than World Book Online, they decide to remedy the situation by taking away Wikipedia.
Frankly, I believe that entirely. When I emailed the IT rep at the county level, and gave her a list of about 10 or so legitimate mathematical processes (such as the Rational Root Theorem, Synthetic Division, Euler's Method, etc), none of which is available on World Book but which is easily readable on Wikipedia, I got a staid and trite reply that basically repeated the "not credible like an encyclopedia" mantra and didn't address my particular points.
Oh well, we've managed since two months ago when I submitted this story. Some of us, being more knowledgable about computers and the internet than the usual lemming teachers around us, have found creative methods of still retrieving the information from Wikipedia we need to be effective teachers. (For example, I saw a handy way of processing a cubic spline based upon a Wikipedia article, which I proved by hand myself during my lunch break to make sure it worked, and then taught it to my students.)
I wonder if World Book has an article on proxies....
Londovir
Londovir
> 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...