Wikipedia as Bathroom Graffiti
Using Wikipedia as an authoritative source is like using bathroom graffiti for relationship advice–it might sound confident, but after a while you’ve got to wonder who wrote it.
If you’ve struggled to explain to students why Wikipedia is not a reliable source, Mark Moran at FindingDulcinea has written The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely on Wikipedia. Among his points:
- You can’t rely on something when you don’t know who wrote it.
- Sometimes vandals create malicious entries that go uncorrected for months.
- There is little diversity among editors.
I wish I would have had Moran’s article about four weeks ago when my eighth graders were deep into the research portion of their I-Search projects. I will certainly be using it next year.
The list is a must-read for anyone teaching research skills at the junior high or high school level. And don’t miss FindingDulcinea’s guide to Wikipedia in the Classroom.
Yes, you’re right about citing Wikipedia, of course.
But I always amaze my students when I tell them that Wikipedia is a terrific resource. They’re so used to every teacher telling them it is pure evil and should never be used.
But the reality is that Wikipedia has real value as a *resource*, not a source. Some articles are better than others, but it is often a good place to start, to “wrap your head” around a topic, to get some background information, and even to find links to legitimate sources.
But still, it’s not a source you want to cite.
Yes, I agree completely, Greg. It’s often one of the first places I go when I am unfamiliar with a topic, just to get “the lay of the land.” It’s also a great site to use to help teach critical thinking skills, by having students evaluate different articles for bias and accuracy.
Yes, I think that we have to help students to differentiate between a source and a resource. Just last week, I asked a student to find the exact birthday of an author. It think that it was Mark Twain. The student came back looking perplexed and said that wikipedia came up as a result, but that he couldn’t trust it. Someone in our school district has done a wonderful job of scaring kids away from wikipedia completely. This is crazy–I use wikipedia all the time to verify simple facts. It’s a source, not a resource.
Thanks for this article. We will be starting a research project soon and I will certainly be sharing that with my students