So I have this thing I do when I need a very quick answer and it is fact based, like a date, location, or history. No, I don't ask Siri (unless I'm driving). Instead, I look it up on Wikipedia.
Right now, there's a lot of educators that are either gasping or shaking their heads in shame. And I used to be one of those educators that told my students they couldn't use it as a resource.
I said things like this:
"Do you know that anyone could just create an account and start typing stuff?"
"How do you know that someone who really knows what they're talking about wrote that?"
"It's not reliable. Choose from one of the resources I gave you."
No student ever questioned me, but looking back, I wish they would have. I wish my students would have brought up the fact that our textbook still said Pluto was a planet, but Wikipedia reflected the change. I wish they would have said that I had taught them to research by gathering multiple resources that all gave the same information, and they could use both their judgement and the strategies I had taught them when reading various Wikipedia articles.
A few years ago, I realized that a friend from high school had listed "Wikipedia Editor" as a job on her Facebook page. This caught my interest, so I asked her about what she did and it's validity. Here's what she told me:
"Since anyone that registers for a wikipedia account can edit pages that aren't protected (locked), they use patrollers who go through every change that is made. The patrollers try to catch vandalism like somebody putting something entirely absurd or their personal opinion on articles. The patrollers can easily reverse the change and go back to the older, archived version of the article before changes were made. If there is uncertainty about whether the edit is "good" or not, the page is earmarked for an editor in that field to look at.
When I log into wikipedia, I can go to that list at my leisure and look through the edits. The ongoing, ever-being-updated list is catered so that those subjects that I've previously said I know more about are higher on my list that things I've indicated I don't know as much about (you rank your knowledge on different subjects 1-10). Occasionally there will be a questionable article marked by a patroller that any editors that have been online have passed by and then the listed editors in that field will get these automatically generated email messages asking you to log in and look it over, starting with those that have a rank of 10 in that category, until someone marks it as okay or switches it back to the archived version. Most of the time the page is marked as "needing cleaned up" or "needing references." Most people that do very much editing keep the articles they contributed to on their "watch list" so that they know if anyone edits their info.
There's sort of a delicate balance between allowing everyone to edit and doing all of this patrolling, and locking problem pages so that only certain people can make changes to it. You don't want a sixth grader writing about his version of what cancer is, or a crusader editing the stem cell page, so certain pages are protected to varying degrees. Those pages have a picture of a padlock in the upper right corner. These pages have gone through WikiProject collaborations to come up with what editors in that field have deemed comprehensive and accurate. Most of these have a place where people can leave comments about possible edits that might need to be made."
This explanation, along with the fact that Wikipedia articles are some of the most up-to-date, always there resources, made me change my mind about whether Wikipedia was a "bad" or "good" resource. Besides, I required my students to back up their research by finding the information in multiple places, anyway. Why was I forbidding one of those multiple resources?
I think the bottom line should be that students should be considering ALL sources, not just the ones provided to them (or in this case, forbidden of them). In today's world, it is so easy to create content, and I can think of many websites right off the top of my head that have erroneous information. I think it's actually a better service to teach our students the 21st century information literacy that will provide them with protocols of how to choose appropriate resources. Besides, Wikipedia is typically where Siri tells me I should look when I ask her, too.
