[Air-l] Teaching the Wikipedia

[Dominic Pinto]

air-l at listserv.aoir.org
--- erickaakcire.1532473 at bloglines.com wrote:

> 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
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Dominic Pinto
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