Reference: WikiProject United States/Assessment. (2018, January 02).
Retrieved from https://en
Monday, July 15, 2019
Wikipedia #learningtool #knowledgebase #underrated #informative #credible #encyclopediasaredumb #interwebs #yolo
"Your references should NOT be from Wikipedia!" I must've heard that line about 600 times during my education. I grew up being told that Wikipedia was not a reliable source and shouldn't be used as a reference. In my personal life, I access Wikipedia nearly every day. If I need to find a piece of information, I simply google it and Wikipedia is usually one of the first links. I trust this website time and time again, yet I've never referenced it in anything school-related because teachers and professors have always told me to avoid the site which must not be named when finding research for a paper. Well, thanks to what I heard in class today, I now feel equipped to defend Wikipedia when it gets dragged through the dirt. Each article is collaboratively written by dozens, sometimes hundreds of competent people and meticulously fact-checked. If a jokester happens to make an edit that communicates false information, it is either automatically deleted or a moderator can go back and edit the falsehood out of the article. I never realized that Wikipedia uses a rating system to classify the quality of their articles. Whitworth University's page is categorized as a start-class page, which falls in the middle of the ranking system. Wikipedia refers to this category as "developing, but quite incomplete." In the future, if I use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, I'll be sure to look at the quality scale and aim to find one that is categorized as a Good Article (GA) or a Featured Article (FA). I've included a meme showing the quality scale. Jeff mentioned the idea of having a class edit a Wikipedia page and I think that is a really cool idea. Having the chance to contribute to a worldwide database would be a unique opportunity for students. I'll be teaching math and I will definitely be incorporating a research-based unit in my classes and I think providing useful edits to a Wikipedia page would be a great method of engaging students in writing while avoiding the typical essay format that they've grown tired of.
Reference: WikiProject United States/Assessment. (2018, January 02).
Retrieved from https://en
Reference: WikiProject United States/Assessment. (2018, January 02).
Retrieved from https://en
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Personally, I've had a mixed bag of responses to using Wikipedia as a source. I've certainly heard teachers insist that Wikipedia was not a valid source of information, while I've had others say that its decent for "general overview" information on a topic, but it should mostly be taken advantage of for its list of sources. I don't believe that I've had a teacher that was 100% for Wikipedia as a source, but after today I could see myself being a teacher who would let my students use Wikipedia as a source of information. If I had my middle school, or even high school students do a research project on a music composer, I think Wikipedia would be a great general information source that I would let be available to my students since it will most likely be something that they'll be familiar with. I'm also not sure how many quality age appropriate music history curriculum exists for middle school and or high school, so my students may be more engaged in reading a Wikipedia article and extracting information from that than trying to wade through an age inappropriate online encyclopedia. For the amount of information I personally gather from Wikipedia, it would be unfair of me to prevent my students from doing the same. Also, even if they collected information from it that wasn't quite accurate, it could also serve as a learning opportunity.
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