[Air-l] Teaching the Wikipedia

[erickaakcire.1532473 at bloglines.com]

I teach a public speaking & rhetoric class in college - largely to sophomore
pharmacy majors, and I'm grading the first batch of speeches which are on
a topic of the student's choosing but must be focused on social science. I've
got about 15% of the speeches that uncritically cite the Wikipedia - clearly
treating it as just another encyclopedia without knowledge of how it is written
- or at least no mention of this. (I thought I mentioned what the Wikipedia
is in at least one section, but perhaps not.)

What I'm doing is explaining
what it is and that it's a good place to look for background info but that
they need to cite the original resources to use the material in their speeches.
I'd also encourage them to do this for any encyclopedic sources. I could think
of scenarios where it might be acceptable to cite the Wikipedia as proof of
norms or accepted beliefs. 

So next week I'm going to discuss this with
my classes along with more on source credibility generally. 

Any suggestions?
How have you handled this? (I'm particularly interested in responses from
other Wikipedia contributors & supporters.)

Thanks,
Ericka Menchen Trevino

Graduate Student
http://blog.erickamenchen.net