Not so quick to rebuff the door to door salesman. Wikipiedia is not yet Encylopedia Brittanica.
From the New York Times
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.
Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.
But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”
The article continues at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html?em&ex=1172552400&en=b403726dbe838b6a&ei=5087%0A
1 comment:
I can't believe teachers were allowing wikipedia to be used in the first place. That's like allowing people to cite the grafiti they find on the bathroom wall.
Like most new media the key to successful use of wikipedia is to follow the links. Good articles contain links citing the sources for the information in that article. The right thing to do is to follow those links until you get to a legit source. It takes about an extra two minutes to do this. The fact that kids weren't doing this does not inspire me with hope in future generations.
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