[Air-l] Teaching the Wikipedia

[Andrew Lih]

On 26 Sep 2005 18:32:18 -0000, erickaakcire.1532473 at bloglines.com
<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.)

Ericka, I suspect you're not the only person in academia facing this issue.

I'm an administrator on Wikipedia, and do research about the project
as well. I'm a fan of students reading it, learning from it, and
contributing to it, but I tell them, I'll mark them down if they cite
it as a source or authority on anything.

You should have them read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia

Specifically, I've added this to the "Citing Wikipedia" section, which
I hope helps:

"First you should question the appropriateness of citing any
encyclopedia as a source or reference. This is not simply a
Wikipedia-specific issue, as most secondary schools and institutions
of higher learning do not consider encyclopedias, in general, a proper
citable source.

"This does not mean Wikipedia is not useful - Wikipedia articles
contain many links to newspaper articles, books with ISBN numbers,
radio programming, television shows, Web-based sources, and the like.
It will usually be more acceptable to cite those original sources
rather than Wikipedia since it is by nature, a secondary source.

"There are cases where contributions to Wikipedia are considered
original and important enough on topics not covered in other works, so
as to be considered a primary source. (For example, the article "f---"
was used in a Colorado court of law to illustrate the vernacular use
of that term.)

"Owing to the radical openness of Wikipedia, decisions about
referencing articles must be made on an article by article basis and .
If one does choose to cite a Wikipedia article, references should
identify a specific version of an article by providing the date and
time it was created. This can be found in the edit history of the
article."

> Thanks,
> Ericka Menchen Trevino
>
> Graduate Student
> http://blog.erickamenchen.net

-Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
Journalism and Media Studies Centre