As a student, I don’t use Wikipedia for research because all my high school teachers and college professors have always told me that we aren’t allowed to use it as a source. Honestly, because of that facet I hardly use Wikipedia at all. In fact the only things I usually use Wikipedia for are to figure out song names for my songs that don’t have names on my iTunes. I usually start my research on Google. And after it finds its billions of answers for me I look at the first few pages and check out the websites that sound reliable.
I would totally let my students use Wikipedia. Because, like the article mentions, it is very accurate, and the things that aren’t accurate are small, maybe even insignificant things in the article. Not to mention, unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia is updated on an almost daily basis so it is current!
I would tell my students to look at Wikipedia but to also look at other places as well. They should go to Google, and to creditable websites but I’m not going to exclude Wikipedia just because some people don’t like it. Especially when people have researched Wikipedia and found out that it is really accurate and very current.
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My teachers have been the same way, their policy has been "wikipedia cannot be used as a source". I agree with your guidelines as far as your policy on using wikipedia in the clasroom. I think that students are able to find reliable information on the site on certain things. I think mainly it is important that students know that information they find on any site may not be reliable, and they always need to check multiple sources.
ReplyDeleteMy teachers also have been the same, I have never used wikipedia as a resource. A lot of the information is credible but some subjects are not required to be sited to the extent that others are, so I would worry that students would merely settle for wikipedia information without checking its credibility first. My understanding of wikipedia is that viewers can edit all the pages, but some pages require more references than others (historical subjects vs. pop culture)
ReplyDeleteAlso the article mentions that wikipedia is meant to be used as a basic refernce source like world book- and for a general overview of a topic, not as a final authoritative source.