I found a blog made by another person on this site about wikipedia, I found it the other day: http://custardblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/the-wikipedia-worry/
Its just a post about their thoughts on this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130325.stm
So i’ve combined my blogs and wrote about both.
The article is about how the founder of wikipedia believes that teachers who have refused to allow students to access are “bad educators”. If you say to a student, you can’t use wikipedia for a project, they’re going to use it anyway. However, the founder of wikipedia also stated that the information collected from wikipedia should be used as a “stepping stone” and that students who just copy straight from wikipedia “deserve a F”, also that some information is inaccurate. Because of some inaccuracies wikipedia should only be used as a stepping stone. I think this is true, as anyone can post on wikipedia, the information maybe incorrect. As the site is not monitored by experts, anything can be posted, someone can post something about spider monkeys and say they’re little furry creatures with big ears, that can shoot webs out of their wrists (i know no one will ever believe that, but still it supports my argument! ) , If a student only used wikipedia as a reference and nothing else than they may fail (especially if they used my example). However I dont think it should be banned from schools, students need all the resources they can get to help them find an answer to a question, not all information on wikipedia is wrong, some of it is reliable. The people who write on wikipedia use references, which are the end of the post. If the references that they used are reliable, then its likely that what they have posted is correct, it just may be a little biased. I think it should be a tool to help students gain a greater understanding of what they are looking for on wikipedia.
The person who wrote the blog believes that students have not been taught proper research skills, and thats why students just use wikipedia.Also restricting students use of a source is counterproductive. This blog outlines the strengths and weaknesses of wikipedia. Such as wikipedia is a good starting place for students to understand the topic. They have also stated that all sources such as wikipedia and text books should backed up with other evidence, so if a student got some information about one topic on wikipedia, they should go to another source and compare that information with a text book or another website, and its up to the student to decide whether or not to use that information they have collected or read off wikipedia. – That is to analyse and determine whether or not that information is correct or not.
Also the nature of the text written in wikipedia is easy for anyone to understand which makes it a highly accessible resource for students to use. This is an advantage as it makes a difficult topic being studied easier to understand. However, this is also a weakness as it’s easy to understand, students take advantage of this and just copy and paste that information into their work, without checking the information they’ve copied is correct.
From Melanie
March 16, 2009 at 1:56 pm |
This ties in with your earlier post about Wikipedia being designed for a certain user demographic – obviously you wouldn’t get scholars/theorists using it as a point of reference, but as a starting point it appears to be a good source of information. But as you’ve mention, that information would have to be checked against alternative, more reliable sources to ensure it’s accurate.
March 17, 2009 at 10:47 am |
Sorry guys iv taken so long to respond, to be honest i kind of forgot about this.
I’ve been doing a bit more reading which i will post up now and the majority of it seems to be about how easy it is to just simply steal informaiton of wikipedia that may not even be correct. I feel that schools need to work with students to change the focus from taking information from wikipedia to giving it. For example a class could chose a topic that may have not been writen about and each children could be given a certain part of the topic to research thoroughly. This could all be brought together and writen up as a report before submiting it into wikipedia.
Not only will students gain valuable skills in research and writing reports but they will learn a valuable lesson that ANYONE can add information to wikipedia.