The Chronicle: Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation

Speaking at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday called “The Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

Teen’s warning on the gospel of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a great place to find out about local bands or start doing research. However, before including Wikipedia information in a term paper or using Wikipedia entries to study for exams, make sure you support your findings with more legitimate sources.

Cornell Profs Slam Use of Wikipedia

Prof. Aaron Sachs, history, said Wikipedia should be used with caution in research. “I tell my students that Wikipedia is sometimes a decent option for a getting a basic overview,” he said. “But even then it takes a lot of practice to recognize when an entry might be more or less reliable.”

Wikipedia in the Classroom: Consensus Among Educators?

I got an email from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who disagreed with me when I suggested that many educators were hostile to the online encyclopedia. His personal experience, he said, suggested quite the opposite. So I asked him if we could take the question public and see what educators had to say about the issue. Jimbo agreed, so I raised the question on my blog and various email discussion lists. While I followed many of the online responses, I never got a chance at examining them as a whole. So I thought I’d take a moment and pull together some of the most interesting responses. Not surprisingly, opinions were all over the map.

New York Times: A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

Academia and Wikipedia

My concern - and that of many of my colleagues - is that students are often not media-savvy enough to recognize when to trust Wikipedia and when this is a dreadful idea. They quote from it as though it cannot be inaccurate. I certainly distrust many classic sources, but i don’t think that an “anti-elitist” (a.k.a. lacking traditional authority and expertise) alternative is automatically better. Such a move stinks of glorifying otherness simply out of disdain for hegemonic practices, a tactic that never gets us anywhere.

Academic Prohibitions on Wikipedia are Misguided

Even people who believe in authoritative sources don’t generally allow reference works as authorities: any citation of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an undergraduate essay (except as a cultural artifact) is a strong sign of a C or D paper.

Wikipedia Receives a Citation

Wikipedia is the ideal place to start your research and get a global picture of a topic, however, it is not an authoritative source. In fact, we recommend that students check the facts they find in Wikipedia against other sources. Additionally, it is generally good research practice to cite an original source when writing a paper, or completing an exam. It’s usually not advisable, particularly at the university level, to cite an encyclopedia.

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