If you type Martin Luther King, Jr. (a person I did many a paper on in my days as a student) into Google or Yahoo the first website it provides on both engines is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. One click onto this site can tell you a great wealth of information about this man and all his great accomplishments. A student can scroll down seemingly forever (from a student’s standpoint) and read more than they ever wanted to know and surely enough to fill a paper for a high school class. The problem is that if you continue to scroll down to look at the “references, further reading, and external links” sections you will find a box stating “This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links or by converting links into footnote references. (August 2010)”1 A notable point to the article on Martin Luther King, Jr. is that the page was updated today, the same day I am looking at it meaning something was changed from what I would have seen yesterday.
The best argument against using Wikipedia as the source for your paper is given by Wikipedia itself. They state right on their citation page, “We advise special caution when using Wikipedia as a source for research projects. Normal academic usage of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is for getting the general facts … and to gather keywords, references and bibliographical pointers, but not as a source in itself. … that anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information, which the reader may not recognize.”2 Wikipedia is able to provide good links and keywords to do research on a topic but it is not the place to stop when doing research for a class.
A big issue I have run into while teaching is that students are so exposed to technology casually in their everyday life that when they are asked to use it in a formal way to do research for a project or paper they don’t have the tools to do so. Just because students have had a computer in their houses since they were born doesn’t mean they know how to responsibly search the internet for legitimate information and then cite those findings in a paper. This runs into the issue from the last blog topic. Students don’t necessarily need to be taught the mechanics of how to use the internet but many need someone to guide them through the rough waters of research and citation. We as teachers need to be aware of the fact that students need to be taught how to do this. You wouldn’t send a kid out into the forest without a compass or other way of knowing how to get through and so we shouldn’t send a student out to do research without arming them with the tools to be successful.
1 Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010, September 6). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr
2 Citing Wikipedia (2010, June 14). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
I agree with what you mentioned about the amount of information that Wikipedia offers. I think that it is a wonderful data base for ideas for school projects, but like you said, we must take great caution in letting students use it. Educators must make it known that this site is not all factual and that other trusted sources should be compared to what is found on Wikipedia. Educators should include in their classroom discussions sites found by students and the teacher. Let students help decide what sites should be allowed in classroom activities. This allows them to voice their opinions and to let the teacher show the them ways to indicate which sites are relevant or not.
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