I was raised by librarians. My mother has her Masters degree in Library Science, and my one of my father's Masters degrees is in Library Science and Technology, so I was raised by two people who knew how to research, and use different queries to find the answers I was looking for, from a young age. Most of the information taught during our course on searching on Google using site: are things that I grew up with and have known all my life. Boolean logic is a normal part of my education, and sometimes I take that for granted. But that said, I did fall into the belief that Wikipedia was an unreliable source all the time, so I was fascinated to learn more about how to check the truth.
I am a Wikipedia junkie. I admit that often find myself jumping from Wikipedia page to page. I have played around with Wikispeedia, the game where you try to reach a specific article in the smallest number of clicks, as well as seeing how every Wikipedia article leads back to the page on philosophy. These things are fun and fascinating to me, so I am always curious just how reliable the source material is on the site. I have known to check the references at the bottom, which has only failed me a few times, finding several dozen broken links, but for the most part every article has been well researched with hundreds of references. So how was I to check the veracity of the page?
Now seeing the back end of a Wikipedia project's standards, it highlights how I can actually do that work myself. The easy use of a rubric, a really clear and concise rubric, makes it that much easier to see whether something on Wikipedia is trustworthy. I am very excited to put this new knowledge to use when I tell other people, who will in turn say "Matt, go away."
Matt!! My kids introduced me to the Wikispeedia game, only we called it just plain old, the Wikipedia game. I, too, have always seen Wikipedia as a non-reliable source, though I was not raised by librarians. But it just makes sense that some of the information must be reliable. And I can speak from experience that if someone randomly edits an entry, either a real person or a bot verifies whether it's nonsense or not. Yes, my kids and I put a bunch of rubbish into an obscure article that we thought no one would catch and by the next day, it was back to the original. Anyway, I agree with you that Wikipedia can be trusted and I think it will be fun to show students that and blow their minds as well! They can't tell you to go away either, because it's your classroom.
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