Wikipedia as a Primary Source

The very first thing students hear before starting a research project is the reminder "Don't use Wikipedia, it isn't a reliable source". This is a double edged sword, as seen in the article linked below. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source... because encyclopedias in general should not be cited as a source. They are meant to be jumping off points for research - ways to get an overview of a topic that helps you find jumping off points for research (to read Wale's thoughts on using Wikipedia, as well as ways to use Wikipedia, click here:  https://teachinghistory.org/digital-classroom/ask-a-digital-historian/23863 ).

As a future social studies teacher, I would love to dig into the idea that Wikipedia pages can be primary sources (and can thus be cited). Today in class, we learned about the "View History" button on Wikipedia that allows you to view any previous versions of a wikipedia site. One possible project I can see myself doing with my students is to examine the evolution of a wikipedia page made around a piece of recent history (in the last twenty years), from the first versions of the page, to the current version of the page. While Wikipedia might not be "citable" as an authoritative source, it is an excellent primary source - it can show how people's thinking on specific events have changed as more evidence has uncovered, and can show how people's viewpoints can change (or not) over time.  Whatever was written about a subject (especially a current event) at a given point reflects what people knew about the subject, and/or thought about the subject at that time. It can be analyzed in the same way that a letter from hundreds of years ago can be analyzed. When used in this way, Wikipedia is a reliable source - it shows the viewpoints of a population at a given point in time, just like letters written in the long ago can be.

It is my hope that by having students analyze past and current Wikipedia pages as primary sources, they will grow in their capacities to recognize things like bias, purpose, and tone in writing. It will also help them become conscious consumers of the internet - I know many students who see everything and anything on the internet as the end-all-be-all - what it says is completely and utterly true. By examining Wikipedia entries, both past and present, as primary sources, I hope that students will be cautious about accepting everything they read as true. I want them to see that things that we take to be "fact" can change as we discover more information. In bringing primary sources to students in a way that they can relate to, they can see that history isn't something that happened hundreds of years ago - it is something that is constantly happening.