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Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor)
kingston writes ""As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"
So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.
Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates.""
When Wikipedia has been vetted by credible institutions as more accurate (at least outside pop-culture) then the "credible expert" Encylopedia Britannica, the trust may be unwitting but is it really unfounded.
Honestly, I find that individual experts make far more mistakes that Wiki, which is to a good degree peer reviewed.
The errors in school textbooks are well known and discussed; many still in existance after decades. So shy of hitting peer-reviewed in-field journals or, of course, doing your own research: whom, exactly, isn't "light-weight" knowledge... or, more to the point, who can be trusted more.
At least Wiki lets you go into the history and see all the editors, everythign else they've edited, what the differing opinions were, and a discussion on the topic at hand. I can't do that with my encylopedia.
As a teacher (11-18) I actually encourage the use of wikipedia as a first stop for information gathering. It gives me a really good way into explaining words such as 'bias' and 'reliable' to students. As long as you explain the things wrong with the website I don't understand the fuss. To be fair, information found on wikipedia is a lot more accurate than the majority on information on the internet. Most pupil's don't even bother reading the information they find, they just copy and paste it (leading to post-grad level work in year 7 student homework). You pretty much have to spend an entire lesson explaining how to gather information and the pitfalls. Wikipedia isn't banned because it's a bad website, it's banned because teachers don't explain how to use it properly.
If they've got such a problem with it, maybe they shouldn't charge $90 for their textbooks. Or thousands of dollars for their expertise.
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
If there's a tremendous worry that Wikipedia is somehow destroying academic integrity, I'm going to need a free, web-based solution, that has the support of a developer community that cares enough to write a website that formats the whole kit-and-caboodle for my iPhone (or for your Treo, or Blackberry for that matter) that allows me to, at a few concise clicks, satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I'm sick of hearing all the griping about Wikipedia, because it's whole purpose is to fulfill the job we're allegedly paying all this money at institutions for: procurement of knowledge. And these hooligans are trying to give it away for free... preposterous. Sometimes I don't want to know the nuances of the issue, I'm just trying to find who the NBA's scoring leader was, or what, for purposes of the article I'm reading, *is* a Boson Particle.
I can't read a book every time I've got a question, I'd literally do nothing at that point. Hell, I barely have the time to use Wikipedia to answer my question. I've got a lot of questions but having a phone on me with Wikipedia access means more of my questions get answered. Until there's a substitute that these people (charging thousands upon thousands for their answers in the form of collegiate education) can provide that helps me with that problem (my insatiable curiosity) Wikipedia's a gamble I'm willing to take. If something sounds unreasonable, I'll try and verify it elsewhere, but it doesn't particularly matter, it wasn't too long ago that Professors and Academics were up in arms about any internet sources; who knows who and what I can trust on the web.
I just want my questions answered people.
... beginning college students typically don't know what constitutes "good research". And they tend to be very trusting, not just of Wikipedia, but of anything on the Internet.
A few years ago I had a student turn in a paper arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. One of the claims the paper raised was that drinking ages are lower in many European countries, and that they have healthier drinking cultures. That's probably true, but the source that the student cited to back up the point was totally inadequate. It was a two paragraph account of German drinking habits. The account was based on an interview with an unnamed exchange student. It was written down by an anonymous high school student. And it was put up on the web as a really badly designed web page. Let's see - anonymous author, anonymous interview subject, obviously done as part of a high school assignment, very short, no details, and badly presented. Not exactly the world's most credible source. I made the student go find a more thorough account of European drinking habits written by an identifiable human being and vetted by some kind of editor.
That's a fairly typical example. However, I don't think it's anything worth getting upset about. Students have long been overly credulous. Heck, people in general are overly credulous. It's always been possible to go out, find crappy information, and blindly accept it. Wikipedia (and more broadly the Internet) just make that easier. Yes, there's a lot of GOOD info out there on the web, too, but finding it can be very difficult.
That being the case, I try to integrate assignments about how you do research, and what constitutes a good source, what Internet sources are good for, and when you might want to hit the library and dig a little deeper. It's really a necessity. The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them. Many schools are beginning to recognize this -- over the last ten years or so the number of positions at academic libraries for "instructional librarians" has skyrocketed. They visit other teachers' classes and teach lessons on search techniques, evaluation of sources, give tours of the specialized databases the university subscribes to, and so on. Some schools are even beginning to offer complete courses on information literacy. I think we'll probably see a good bit more of this over the next few years.