Techlearning blog

Tim Holt has shared a great article from the Denver Post on April 30th about WikiPedia called Kissing the Books Goodbye which is one of the most positive mainstream press articles I've read to date on WikiPedia.

http://web.mac.com/timholt/iWeb/Byte%20Speed/Blog%20Speed/778D335E-C37E-4E77-9296-3538259D77C6.html

Wesley,

The article in the Post was actually titled Grading Wikipedia, Tim's post was titled Kissing the Books Goodbye.

For what it's worth, I also blogged about the article in the Post - http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/05/wikipedia-4-out-of-5-experts-agree.html

From a school librarian, in Maine where all 7th and 8th graders have 1-1 iBooks with Internet access.

Starting research with encyclopedia information gives you the basic knowledge to dig deeper. World Book is the standard resource and is on the student's laptops. But we do accept wikipedia as a source, if it is visited twice 24 hours apart. This gives a check to see if the information has changed, which leads to a discussion of how and why it can change.

This is also a great time to talk about the reliability of authors. "you are a reliable source of how you see events in your classroom, but who is reliable for an event in another school?" Reliability needs to be addressed often and on the students' level of understanding!

I often recommend wikipedia for images, as Goggle images is filtered, and wikipedia includes the copyright information for their images. This is an excellent time to cover the reasons for copyright and what public domain & Creative Commons mean.

So, we had this REALLY SCARY LOOKING bug in the sink in my office -- it had A LOT OF legs -- and I thought "this could be a centipede - aren't they poisonous?" -- so I checked online and one of the sources I looked at was Wikipedia -- and it said
"[The house centipede] is an insectivore that kills and eats insects, as well as graduate students."

I love Wikipedia, but it's not a tool I would use for serious research!

I have my students use the Internet for all research in my classroom. The majority of the time, they will use Wikipedia for their information and about 85-90% of the time the information is accurate. Because of this, I usually discuss with them the necessity of verifying the information on other web sites rather than using Wikipedia as the sole source of their research.

Wikipedia can be used by students to get initial information on a topic, but should not be used as source. High school students should learn to research thouroughly and verify each source. Unfortunately, many teachers assume students are information literate and do not teach them how to verify sources and facts. Students must be taught how to effectively research online.

Hi Peg,

What you are referring to is vandalism which is part of the dynamic nature of this text. And your understanding is the use of "Critical Literacy" with relation to this source, a skill which our students should be developing.

I can see through the history of the page you are referring to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Centipede&limit=500&action=history

And did not see when the vandalism was fixed. Can you give me an approximate date of when you saw that error, because I can't see what you are referring to with regards to graduate students. I would like to see when it was fixed.

What benefit do you see in limiting resources with your students?

As I assist our K-6 staff in the computer lab - when it comes to research and identifying reliable/credible resources and evaluation sites, I encourage both the teachers and students to NOT use wikipedia as their primary source. But I do tell them it is a great place to look when you are trying to locate hard-to-find info or interesting facts. I also tell them that if something doesn't sound right, check it with a known, reliable source - which for our school corp. is WorldBookOnline.
Wikipedia has its place in research and it is up to us to show students how to use it effectively.

Joyce Howard;

Please don't use anecdotal numbers without identifying them as such. If you have evidence of entries with incorrect information, please provide them as evidence . . . then go in and fix them! Don't throw around numbers like that without checking to see if students are simply mistranslating the sites as they often do with any site or any paper encyclopedia. It's not wikipedia's fault that students don't read carefully. If wikipedia was incorrect 15% of the time, it would have died long ago.

You cannot reliably use a source that can be edited by anyone. Look at what happened during the last few political elections. People were editing the bios of politicans to include incorrect information or to make them look bad. Wikis can be used as reference, but should not be used as a source - imho. I would suggest backing up the wiki info through a more reliable source (World Book, Britanicia, etc.).

Hi Brian,

Actual Brian, you will notice although there is open editing, there are safegaurds. Ip blocking, locking articles, editors reverting back content etc. etc.

Have you actually tried to edit wikipedia? I stopped listening to criticism from those who are not using or creating with these tools because they really don't understand how it works.

Love to hear from you, and add back into this conversation.

Please see:

On Wikipedia and the Meaning of Everything by David Thornburg

For other ideas:

http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/commentpost.aspx?news=no&postid=18893

Okay since I'm adding in connections:

Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia

Criticism of Wikipedia
on Wikipedia of Course
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

Because it wouldn't be an open text if it didn't criticize itself.

Jon Udell's screencast on the heavy metal umlaut page in Wikipedia is a powerful argument for the use of Wikipedia, and one which I show in the early weeks of the community college course I teach on writing the research paper.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/22.html#a1156

One more link to a general resource on wikis that I use with other educators that you might find useful:

http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wikis