Some folks over at Imperial College in London are trying to set standards for valid academic usage of Wikipedia. What do y'all think? Good academic adaptation to changing technology? A sign of the impending apocalypse? Something in between?
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It sounds like they mostly--for now--want to raise awareness about Wikipedia as a tool but not a source. Which is something I've done with my students for awhile; I tell them that if they must, they can start with Wikipedia, but they should immediately scroll to the bottom and start looking up the sources the Wiki editors used rather than the actual text of the entry.
ReplyDeleteIt really depends on what standards they set. The reality is that Wikipedia is both unstable and highly useful, especially at capturing the conventional wisdom. This is why academics have so much trouble with it, especially in history, cultural fields: scholarly revisions to the consensus narrative get reverted rather than respected.
ReplyDeleteIn geeky areas - comic books, SF, etc. - it's a fantastic resource, and in non-controversial scientific and mathematical fields, it's quite good.
Recognition that authorship and context matter are just basic good practice with regard to any source. Wikipedia is just more so.
I'm not letting my history majors use it, though.
I would like to elevate Wikipedia as the single source for plagiarizing. It would make it so much easier to detect. The more students use Wikipedia, the more they will copy from it. The more they copy from Wikipedia, the less time I spend tracking down other sources using Google.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Ben.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I usually find that technical topics on Wikipedia to be quite good and not unstable at all. The more technical the topic, the better. So good, in fact, I suspect many undergraduates wouldn't be able to understand the articles.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, as long as students are asked to evaluate the worthiness of the source (Wikipedia included), and back up things that might need some extra credibility, I don't care if they use Wikipedia. Much of the more "researchable" topics my students write about have Wiki pages that are heavily trafficked, moderated, and sometimes even locked down.
ReplyDeleteI never let my students use Wikipedia, full stop.
ReplyDeleteThis is probably a science versus everything else division. For science stuff I found Wikipedia to be fine. It loses my support as it crosses to history or political topics. Although I have not noticed many flaws if I am looking up biographical info.
ReplyDeleteCertainly it seems like a good starting place for most topics. Will the typical student go beyond Wikipedia? Or just start cutting-and-pasting there.
Any Encyclopedia is for grade school papers, NOT college, except as a place to start.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia is not where good information comes from. The references at the bottom of the page are where the info comes from. I wouldn't even call wikipedia a secondary source.
ReplyDeleteBut I think it's a gret place for a student to (a) get a reader's digest version of the topic and (b) find good books or sites to get proper information about the topic.
I'm with Middle-Aged and Morose. It's not so much whether information is correct (although that's important), but the fact that students need to learn to find credible info and judge/analyze it for themselves instead of having it handed to them like every other thing in life! In third grade, we copied from encyclopedias and thought that was a report we'd written. In college, I expect students to use their discernment and figure out for themselves what makes credible information instead of using what someone ELSE has judged to be useful. This is for important major papers (not for piddly shit they turn in to GE courses I am forced to teach, where it doesn't matter WHERE they find out what date Hitler supposedly died).
ReplyDeleteSince I consult wikipedia myself on occasion to get an overview of a subject I know little about -- and, yes, as a shortcut to a list of more-reliable sources that is somewhat better-vetted/more selective than the raw results of a google search -- it would be hypocritical of me to tell my students "don't go near it." But it's still a tertiary source, and a considerably more uneven, and thus unreliable, one than a well-edited encyclopedia such as the Britannica or a good subject encyclopedia. I wouldn't cite it in a paper myself, and I strongly discourage my students from doing so. Instead, like several others above, I suggest that they follow the notes and bibliography to better sources. If they can't find a note for the particular factoid they want to cite, and/or can't find that factoid in the cited work -- well, that's a problem, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteP.S. Cynic: I would consider the date of Hitler's death to be common knowledge, and so not in need of citation at all. Of course, if they're getting into conspiracy theories about whether he actually died when he was supposed to have died, that's another matter. I tend to use the date of Nixon's resignation -- which I can only recall to the month without a reference, and which my students can't recall at all, since they weren't alive, but which is available in a tremendous number of sources -- as an example of common knowledge.
P.P.S. Has anybody here ever written a Wikipedia article about a subject they have researched, but which isn't yet covered there (e.g. a lesser-known author)? I'm considering doing that at some point, but haven't quite decided whether it's a good idea.
A medical student named Mr Patel says that "The quality [of Wikipedia] has improved and the readability is often second to none."
ReplyDeleteWTF????? The text of many Wikipedia articles is so poorly-written that it makes me want to poke out my own eyes. Not to mention how it's often decorated with "citation needed" tags.
No Wikipedia allowed. This statement is in the syllabus and I start discussing this in the early part of the semester and repeat every week. [But, yes, there always seems to one that seemingly never heard it. No soup for them!]
ReplyDeleteI go along with The Contemplative Cynic and several others. It's just not suitable for classroom work. It IS suitable for selective learning about things in your own time (like the rather amusing "List of common misconceptions" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions).
CC, yes. I used to edit it but got burned out on the constant political battles over some topics, and the need to fix junior high vandalism.
ReplyDeleteThere is still an article on a minor silent movie star that is largely mine and a BRIEF article I wrote on a cartoon character was moved (fairly I thought) to a larger article...
CC - I've thought of writing Wikipedia articles, but doing it well will take exactly as much time and effort as writing something for a refereed journal, for which you would actually get credit, so I always choose the latter. For me at least, writing a Wikipedia article would be a particularly seductive form of procrastination.
ReplyDeleteI'll lift my cover just a teensy bit to say that yes, I've edited many pages on Wikipedia (edit count is > 2000) and started a number of articles. We are currently encouraging academics to get over their fears of Wikipedia and give it a try.
ReplyDeleteFactual error? Fix it. Setting up a name first and not just editing from an IP will build up a reputation for you.
Bullshit propaganda? You can delete, too.
Something missing? Write it!
Be prepared for others to work with your texts. They will be better, believe me. This is the hard part for us, letting go of text ownership.
We've tried to come up with ways to encourage people to edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recruiting_Editors_Brainstorming and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#How_to_Attract_Thousands_of_New_Editors
We'd like to welcome you to take a dip in the pond!
As I tell my students, Wikipedia is a good place to start, but a lousy place to finish. But if they draw from it, they damn well better cite it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it comes down to whether we think that it's acceptable for students to use tertiary sources in their major papers as part of the required academic sources. Not much of depth can be explored, in my opinion, if they're only citing an encyclopedia (at least the kinds of encyclopedias I spent much of my childhood reading). How is that any better than even just quoting from the textbook?
ReplyDeleteThis stuff predates Wikipedia; there was a book published in the early 1960s called "The Myth of the Britannica" by a man named Harvey Einbender, and he found that some articles were stripped-down versions from the 1890s edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, some of the science articles were not written for the layman, and there was more coverage of World War I than World War II (article was from the 1923 edition.) He also brought up the high-pressure sales tactics of EB salesmen and the chintziness of the "Great Books of the Western World" supplimentary (tiny print, the use of public domain translations, the subject matter.) Now we have the Wikipedia, which covers a lot more information, is free, but is easily vandalized, and full of many holes. So which is worse: the expensive encyclopedia set full of a mishmash of obsolete, bleeding edge, and middling information or the free "virtual encyclopedia" thats always mutating and may have the correct information but no citations to prove it?
ReplyDeleteThey're both Cliff Notes of the world....
I tend to treat Wikipedia as a sort of _Hitchhiker's Guide to Modern Civilization_.
ReplyDelete"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the _Hitchhiker's Guide_ has already supplanted the great _Encyclopaedia Galactica_ as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."
@Suzy: thanks for the encouragement, and for the links. It's helpful to have a place to get started.
ReplyDelete@Merely: that's definitely been part of my thought process. If I do write for Wikipedia, it will be after I have both published about the subject and created a web page of my own with supplemental materials, and part of my purpose would be to point to my own published and web works (in the guise of citing myself as someone with authority established by scholarly publication). I'm not sure whether that's considered bad form or not, but it does seem to have some historical parallel in the Britannica's practice of commissioning articles by published scholars on the subject, at least for some subjects.
Glad to see some of you defending Wikipedia's technical entries. I'm with you on that - especially the Wikipedia Math Portal. I'd need hundreds of textbooks to replace all the information that is contained therein, but then again, citation generally isn't necessary for something like a theorem from Euclid's day.
ReplyDeleteAs a starting point, Wikipedia is a good way to get an overview of the subject, and the footnotes at the bottom are invaluable - I've found some very obscure references by looking at Wikipedia footnotes. It is also a fun way to while away time researching Star Trek or other geeky pursuits. But as a source of critical analysis, it's terrible. I've seen some ridiculous statements about the literary mainstays of a typical English degree. That's probably why liberal arts professors hate it while technical/math professors like it and encourage me to use it.
@Electric Maenad, the parallels between Wikipedia and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are indeed shocking.
ReplyDeleteOnce of my colleagues tells a lovely story about a prof who used to edit a random Wikipedia page, in real time, in front of undergrad students, to say something totally ridiculous and patently false, to demonstrate why Wikipedia was not an acceptable academic source in the humanities and social sciences. (I believe this is now known as demonstrating the "Esperanza Spalding Effect.)
ReplyDeleteAccuracy issues aside, Wikipedia doesn't help students learn to think or write - the two things an undergrad education in the humanities is supposed to give students the tools to do. (Wow, I'm such an idealist today.) Wikipedia is like the researching / writing equivalent of a fast-food drive through, so I'm unsurprised that it's being embraced by the McEducation Industrial Complex.
With apologies to the self-admitted Wikipedia editor above, most of the entries are poorly structured and clumsily written. Many look a lot like co-written undergrad papers (you know the ones I'm talking about), except with marginally better spelling and grammar.
Reading well written articles / essays / book chapters pushes me to a better writer. It reminds me that writing is a craft, and honing it takes skill, perseverance, and dedication. Because it doesn't value or support nuance or subtlety, because it requires everything to be (over)processed into bite sized chunks, Wikipedia as an educational tool will never be anything but a blunt instrument.