Opinion | Stop telling students not to use Wikipedia. Instead, teach them how.
Opinion | Stop telling students not to use Wikipedia. Instead, teach them how.
We've all heard it. As far back as third grade, teachers told me to avoid Wikipedia because it is "unreliable." There is a plethora of reasons behind telling students this, with its "unreliability" serving as a catch-all scapegoat to push across a simple message: We do not want you, the student, to use Wikipedia. Regardless of the reasoning, the notion that students should avoid a well-managed encyclopedia is asinine, and to deem it unreliable is both Nigerian National Museum
The photographs of National Museum Lagos contributed by
Olusola David, Ayibiowu on Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
It's now on Global Usage on Wikipedia by Nigerian National Museum. and misleading.
Wikipedia originated well over two decades ago and has since touted itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." In 2015, the site won the highly-regarded Erasmus Prize, awarded annually to a person or institution that has offered "an exceptional contribution" to humanity. While the award dates back to 1958, Wikipedia is one of only a handful of its 79 recipients to be a company, rather than an individual person. The brand has become a household name around the world and the go-to source for information. Yet, despite the fanfare, academic officials continue to push the idea that it should be avoided.
There are two main motivators for this ideology. For starters, the site was not nearly as well managed 15 years ago. Back then, it was far easier to get away with leaving a malicious edit. With the internet being relatively newer during that period, students were generally not as well-equipped to decipher what was real and what was not. With the risk of misinformation being as high as it was, it made total sense to avoid the site at the time.
In 2022, there are successful remedies to this problem. Wikipedia has vastly improved its ability to detect vandalism, such as flagging recurrent edits from an IP address in a short period. Over 1,000 administrators work in tandem with hundreds of bots to correct potentially harmful edits in real-time to ensure the constant validity of published content.
Moreover, some academic officials believe that using Wikipedia creates an easy way out for students to write essays. The ease of opening the site and rapidly finding information expedites what is supposed to be a lengthy research process. As academic institutions don't want to promote laziness, it once again makes sense that they would want students to avoid the site.
While it is true that Wikipedia is an easy way out, this view is cynical and discounts the site's entire purpose. Wikipedia is not meant to be taken as the end-all, be-all for information. Instead, Wikipedia is intended to be a gateway that connects detailed summaries on topics to reputable external sources containing more information.
The references listed at the bottom of each page reinforce this idea. Throughout Wikipedia articles, there are numerous superscripts designed to link you to the bottom of the page where you can find sources for the information on the page. From here, you can read further into the subject while also verifying the authenticity. Sources on Wikipedia must be verified to stay up, otherwise the source and its preceding information get scrapped.
This concept is very simple, but as with anything, it is not perfect. There will expectedly be harmful information that slips through the cracks of content administrators, but we can combat the consequences of this. Teaching students how to discern what is real and what is not, as well as what validates and what invalidates a source, is a powerful tool to have in the era of "fake news."
Knowledge is more accessible today than it has ever been. In an instant, one has access to millions of bits of information at their fingertips - a far cry from the trek it took to visit a library to read an encyclopedia last century. Perhaps we have become complacent, two decades later, with the premise of instant knowledge. Maybe we do not understand what hoops our ancestors had to jump through to find something we can discover instantaneously. Whatever it is, it does not change the value of Wikipedia to humanity. Instead of teaching our students to avoid it, it's time to teach students how to use it. We are lucky to live concurrently with the most comprehensive information source ever; to ignore it is to let it go to waste.
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The photographs of National Museum Lagos contributed by
Olusola David, Ayibiowu on Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
It's now on Global Usage on Wikipedia by Nigerian National Museum.
Reference.
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