Week 5 Reflection: The Wikipedia Debate

Above is the welcome video to my topic presentation this week on Wikipedia and its role in education. I ended up finding it to be such an interesting topic, and thus wrote a little bit about three main issues in the Wikipedia/Wiki debate: the debate on Wikipedia's legitimacy, teaching students how to deal with the amount of information online, and using Wikis in the classroom.

For me, the most interesting part is the debate on Wikipedia's legitimacy. Not many people have posted in my discussion board yet (hopefully they will soon), but I really understand both sides here. Essentially, the debate has two arguments: pro-Wikipedia (it's an amazing wealth of information, collaboratively edited by people all over the world) and anti-Wikipedia (the quality of this information simply cannot be truly regulated and guaranteed). I really do see both sides. It's wonderful that people can collaborate on such a global level, sharing information and working together. However, you simply can't guarantee how accurate the information is. True, a study showed that Wikipedia only had four errors per entry as opposed to Britannica's three, but Robert McHenry makes a good point when he also critiques the quality of the writing, not just the accuracy of the information.

That said, for all the teachers that support Wikipedia, most will not support using it as a reliable source, or will at least tell students to use it as a starting point and to not rely on it completely. Many say to not bother citing it - just check it for a place to start and then look elsewhere for the real information. That's just been my personal experience from working with other teachers (maybe others have had different experiences). This also plays on McHenry's point, about the writing being poor even if the information is accurate. And do we really want to point our students towards bad writing? It's quite a risk.

References:
McHenry, Robert. "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia." Technology Commerce Society (2004): n. pag. Web. 25 Jan 2010.