Wikipedia

[Mike]

I've been waiting for a chance to snap this picture in our library for a few weeks now. What strikes me about it is the word "frustration." Wikipedia has never frustrated me in fact at times it's surprised and delighted me.

A couple cases in point, this summer a teacher at an AP US history conference was looking state-by-state election returns from 1828 and just couldn't find them. My search of first resort is generally wikipedia and there buried in the reference notes was the desired data.

Earlier this year during an in-service, our speaker explained how her son used 16 sites to write a paper and that had been cross pollinated with bad information about the history of the dishwasher. Later in her presentation she left me with the impression that trusting wikipedia was sketchy. Overly curious and pro-wikipedia, I went home that night and used wikipedia to research the history of the dishwasher. In five seconds I had all the factual data I needed and a link to a resource supporting the entire entry from the New York Times. While I was at it I found a silly line at the end of the entry and cleaned it up. I found what I needed and contributed to body of human knowledge, not a bad three minutes. Imagine the time her child would have saved if he had simply used wikipedia from the beginning.

What might be frustrating to me is to open an encyclopedia and see Pluto referred to as a planet. Actually, that wouldn't be frustrating at all, but does let me make take a dig at static knowledge. Yes, wikipedia can be edited for evil, but I hold that the forces of good will win the intellectual day. To paraphase Ronny Reagan "trust, but verify"

Does wikipedia or wikiphobia frustrate you?

[Jenifer]

This is a great topic. It seems to me that Wikipedia thrives on the notion of the unified field. That is, because it is open and allows for all input available, it self-corrects continuously and therefore enables access to the truth. Yes, from time to time there are some inacuracies, redundancies or outright silliness -- and so does life! So, to answer your question, wikiphobia frustrates me while Wikipedia does not. I'll be curious what this informal poll reflects!

[Ginny]

I believe the library staff used the word "frustration" to convey the time and effort the wikipedia user must invest in cross-checking the information; something which is already done for them by the staff at Britannica.

Personally I do not have a frustration with Wikipedia per se; we can all identify with the examples where Wikipedia has appeared to deliver the right information at the right time. I do however have a frustration with students who use any information unquestioningly. It is vital we teach students to be discerning users of information. It is shocking that so many students in higher education lack these skills. We should be instilling this attitude when they are still at school.

Hand in hand with this, we have to get across the idea that there is no "one-stop shop" of information on the web. Sites like Wikipedia make it very easy for students to find information to put in their coursework. In many ways it's too easy and leads to poor discipline in terms of research skills.

In some universities lecturers 'ban' the use of Wikipedia and students struggle to find information because they can't go somewhere, grab what they want and get out. Today's students expect everything to be online (preferably in the one place).

To sum up, my frustration is with the attitude that any single source is a panacea for research woes. Seedlings members might also be interested in Andrew Keen's views in "The cult of the amateur" who makes some interesting points about truth.

[Bob Sprankle]

Ginny,

I totally agree that we must help students (and adults) to not rely on "one-stop shopping". This can be tough when we use such tools as Google and click only on the top links, when there might be better "gems" hidden deeper.

I would argue that Britannica might also encourage "one-stop shopping". I know it did when I was a student. If it's in the Britannica, I believed it must be true and looked no further.

In using Wikipedia, students may have an opportunity to realize that one source just doesn't cut it. That we must always verify, seek alternative voices, other accounts. Even with the Britannica.

In using Wikipedia, that's my starting point which will lead me to seek other resources that either agree or disagree. In using Britannica, I never bothered to extend my search.

My 2 cents :)

Bob

[Ginny]

Bob

you are absolutely right about the need to preach for the need for 'comparison shopping' even with trusted and established sources like Britannica.

I dont know about your student days but during mine there was no information online and finding information was so much harder. It's perhaps not surprising that we didnt venture further than a single seminal reference work! Nowadays it's turned around completely; there's so much information online we need to develop strategies for evaluating it.

That evaluation includes critically appraising information for bias, currency, accuracy and so on as well as comparing it to other publicly available information. By way of example, consider the case of the researcher who had failed to extend his searches sufficiently:

"In 2001, a 24-year-old volunteer in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University suffered a reaction to a chemical (hexamethonium) used in the clinical trial and died. Before conducting the study, the researcher had conducted Internet and medical database searches for information about possible dangers of the drug. However, he didn't know that one of those databases, the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, which is a well-respected resource, only contains data back to 1966 and thus did not include the scholarly articles published in the 1950s that made reference to the dangers of the drug. The researcher probably would have found these articles -- and the young woman would not have died -- if he had known the limitations of his searching strategies".

Certainly food for thought, eh?

[Bob Sprankle]

Ginny,

Wow... what an example! Holy cow...

I totally agree: evaluation is key. Hopefully putting tools such as Wikipedia into the mix forces that constant need... and perhaps will sharpen us with a skill we should have been using all along, even with "trusted and established sources".

This is such a great thread!

Bob

[Janice Friesen]

I like what you say about verifying what you find in Wikipedia in other places. I think one of the problems with our view of Wikipedia is our view that Encyclopedias are the final source for truth. Wikipedia is not and never has claimed to be that.

I also love the fact that you conributed to it right away. I have heard people complain about things that they find that are not true and I always think, "Then why not change it?!"

Janice

[Ernie Easter]

It is all about digital literacy. I find wikipedia getting better at policing itself. While yes you can edit, I believe there are gatekeepers that verify information on entries prone to misinformation and they now review changes before being posted to pages which are often vandalized.

From wikipedia <<a href="About Wikipedia">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About>;
Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which, in principle, anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed (see Researching with Wikipedia for more details). However, unlike a paper reference source, Wikipedia is continually updated, with the creation or updating of articles on topical events within seconds, minutes or hours, rather than months or years for printed encyclopedias.

Also check out the Help:Administration page for more information about pages being protected from vandalism.

[coakes]

Wikipedia does not frustrate me at all. What frustrates me is that our students use it as the first and last stop for information after they begin their search with yahoo or google.

However these are teachable moments and we need to continue spreading the word. One way to do this is to make screencasts with directions since we can't be everywhere. I really like the jingproject for making mini movies for directions.
Here is my jing for the latest in Library of Congress and FlickR mashing up.

[Ernie Easter]

My expectation is that students will cite their source and depending what we are doing that can range from a formal MLA citation to copy & paste the web address. They are so astonished sometimes when the citation is www.google.com and I tell them that Google is not the source. "But that's where I found it." I echo Cheryl, that is what frustrates me.

[Bob Sprankle]

I think one thing that gets overlooked in all the Wikipedia controversy is the celebration that such an "experiment" can even work. We know that much of the Internet is being built by the "kindness of strangers"... for free, out of the "goodness of heart." People writing their blogs, or contributing to further discussions here at ning, or offering up free workshops at K12Online adds to the incredible "wealth" and makes us a very lucky generation to have so much information/support/knowledge/entertainment literally at our fingertips.

If you had asked me in the beginning of Wikipedia that such an enterprise would work ---being built by people on their own free time--- I probably would have said that it would be a short lived "happening".

I'd have been very wrong. It's going strong and is impressive in its scope, evolution, and yes, even accuracy.

Not only "by the people, for the people", but also constantly being tuned up, corrected, and *cared* for by the people.

[Alice Barr]

While it's frustrating that students copy and paste information from sites, I have to ask why students are required to submit assignments that are a regurgitation of information. They will happily comply with giving back information in the quickest and easiest way possible. Perhaps if more critical thinking aspects were added to the assignment and that the outcome or answer might not be known, students would learn to use these web resources differently.

[Ernie Easter]

Critical thinking and ways of looking at and creating new information or product is one aspect of learning, but we also want students to be able to write about information. When students write using information that is not theirs, they must be able to paraphrase it and then cite it. This also extends to students who create products using information from other sources as their foundation. I tell my students, "If it wasn't your original idea, cite it."

From my own classroom experience, I do find I have less of a plagiarism issue with projects then I have with writings.