Professors To Ban Students From Citing Wikipedia 507
Inisheer writes "History professors at Middlebury College are tired of having all their students submit the same bad information on term papers. The culprit: Wikipedia — the user-created encyclopedia that's full of great stuff, and also full of inaccuracies. Now the the entire History department has voted to ban students from citing it as a resource. An outright ban was considered, but dropped because enforcement seemed impossible. Other professors at the school agree, but note that they're also enthusiastic contributors to Wikipedia. The article discusses the valuable role that Wikipedia can play, while also pointed out the need for critical and primary sources in college-level research." What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
With City Wikis like Bloomingpedia [bloomingpedia.org], a lot of the information is gathered from observation and personal research and there isn't much else to reference. I'm wondering how referencing then will pan out, if it ever needs to be done.
check the sources (Score:1, Insightful)
Use it properly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Citing encyclopedias? (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything! (Score:4, Insightful)
In academics? It is obviously not suited for citing factual information, but it certainly helps students formulate and nurture ideas and theories. It can help point them in the right direction, and it can also lead them towards more factual sources.
A ban on citing Wikipedia is expected, but Wikipedia is far too powerful to dismiss as not having a role in education.
Re:check the sources (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Role for Wikipedia in academic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:textbook replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this an issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
It's for background reading and finding primary and secondary sources. As such, this is how I use it.
Interesting that the profs contribute. Part of the reason why wikipedia is better than Brittanica.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Wikipedia is a great place to start your research. It can even be perfect for solving quick arguments on the Internets. But it should never show up as a citation in any professional or educational context. Which is something one needs to keep in mind, as it's very easy to slip up and treat them as authoritive. They're not. They're just an encyclopedia.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia has been shown to be riddled with errors, and should be used only as a quick reference or as a place to find links to more information, not as a citeable source in real research. Professors get proven wrong all the time, that's the nature of scholarship. Some might get a little bent out of shape about it, but if they were going to be shown wrong by Wikipedia, they would probably be shown wrong with a whole lot more credibility by a whole lot of other, more reliable, sources.
Re:Use it properly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Citing encyclopedias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:check the sources (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Citing encyclopedias? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:5, Insightful)
I've taught at the university level, and I can assure you it isn't sufficient. Rational arguments won't do it, as far as the students are concerned, everything that isn't forbidden is permitted. If Wikipedia isn't explicitly banned, students will ignore your "just do the right thing" and will continue to insist that Wikipedia is a perfectly valid and reliable source.
Students are lazy and going to the library is work. Many have never used anything besides Google and Wikipedia for research; they don't know how to efficiently track down sources and references. As other posters have pointed out, in my day it was [paper] encyclopedias, this is just a variation on the theme. They were forbidden (with good reason) when I was a student, and they should be forbidden now for the same reasons.
-JS
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
With Wikipedia's intentions of citing sources in as many articles as possible, this is especially true. Often you can find the original source of information more accurately than a google search because it's linked right in the article. Go to the original source, get the details, and cite them.
Wikipedia don't care (Score:1, Insightful)
Wikipedia is quickly turning into an astroturfing playground for hardcore subject nerds (note how many comic book articles there are and then look how many webcomic articles there are, and how many pages dedicated to characters of comic book characters... no matter how little role they had in some comic in the 70's.) that get into editing wars with each other and declare any attempt to preserve or delete content they edited as sockpuppeting or meatpuppeting or whatever the crap they call it.
Wikipedia is not a credable source of any material any more than the local newspaper, and we all know how the media likes to spin things. If you are going to use wikipedia, skip the content and go straight to the links at the bottom of most articles that are researched. Then you don't get all the information and nothing "not-notable" omitted.
Wikipedia is the slashdot equivilent of an encyclopedia, full of subject material only the nerds want or care about and everything else is not-notable.
Greatest minds (Score:3, Insightful)
And just as often, most of the greatest minds have been at one point in fundamental disagreement with each other. I.e., they're often wrong. One aspect of being great is daring to make great mistakes.
However, the argument here is about Wikipedia being cited. Citing primary sources will not change whether or not the professor is in fundamental disagreement with the larger community. That said, primary sources are what the students should be using for their own research. One should not cite Wikipedia any more than one should cite Encyclopedia Brittanica - except for those very few rare cases, if any, where Wikipedia might actually be the primary source.
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:2, Insightful)
I've seen the quality of the students in my school decline, and I've seen first years out right try to look for the prof's editions of certain books to answer their homework.
Well, finally someone got enough balls to do this, but it shouldn't have took them that long anyways.
Amen (Score:1, Insightful)
On the second day in class the professors (there were three of them) were saying how all the world's workers would be making as little as workers in a third world country in ten years. I raised my hand and argued with them, pointing out that in Thailand (then a 3rd world country with little infrastructure; the nearest town had no electricity, gas, running water, or paved roads) although a worker made only $1000 a year, the economy was completely different. There you only had to pay a nickle to go about anywhere within an hour's drive, my extravagant bungalow had cost me $30 a month, I could feed myself and three whores in a nice restaraunt for a dollar, including beer, and so on. I argued that for labor prices to fall, the price of everything else had to fall (or hilarity ensues, as we say at
Their answer was that you have no housing costs if you own your home (!!!) and you could always live on beans and peanut butter.
I called them idiots, stomped out of class (with several others following and several others laughing) and dropped the idiots' classes. Perhaps one of the morons are reading this now, and have finally realized that their predictions were wrong (and stupid) or at least over thirty years late. Or maybe, being the dumbasses they are, still believe it.
Maybe all these inaccuracies I hear about on Wikipedia are from college professors? I've looked up lots of stuff on the wiki and have only found one bad item, and it was a bit of a nit anyway (Wikipedia stated only that the CrystalLens offered nearly glasses-free seeing, when I'd done away with glasses altogether; I corrected it by adding that "some patients can do away with glasses altogether" (I wonder if it stuck?).
But at any rate (and more on topic), you don't cite the Encyclopedia Britannica (let alone Encarta!) in a college paper. Why is disallowing Wikipedia a bad thing? You use it as a starting point to your research, not the end point.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this an issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
Right, because Brittanica's contributors are all random 15-year-olds from the Internet. I think they actually exclude contributions from anyone they can prove has a tenure-track position anywhere, right?
Re:Special Peer-Reviewed Article Revisions. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, It would certainly solve one problem with the wiki model though - that where, if you hold an unpopular view, no matter how provable in fact it may be, it may be it will always be edited to match popular opinion, whether that's reality or wikiality regardless.
That's wikifailure. And one more reason why it should never ever be cited.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:1, Insightful)
I assume that example with GW would be easy. How about the date that he was born or where he lived when he was 12 or how many days of school he missed? How about when or who discovered the Mississippi river? People could have been there years before but never wrote about it. Who is to say an entire team found it years earlier but never really cared enough to tell a local newspaper about it? How many people were employeed in coal mines in 1910? Are yo ushure? All "facts" are passed around and restated over and over again. Unless you actually witnessed the event yourself, you can not be sure it actually happened as others may have stated. Is using Wikipedia crossing the line? I don;t think so.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
I did find some possibly unintended humor in your comment, though. With an edit war, just as any other war, it is always the victor that defines the facts.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
"We only allow reputable sources in Wikipedia, but reputable sources are frequently mistaken {{fact}}.
Virtually every peer-reviewed paper in mathematics contains some mistakes {{fact}}, and it wouldn't be difficult to enter all sorts of incorrect mathematical theorems into Wikipedia, carefully sourcing every single one of them with a peer-reviewed paper by an established research mathematician{{fact}}. Text books contain even more mistakes{{fact}}, and they are also considered reputable.
Results reported in the scientific literature are often later overturned or invalidated, for example if the experimental results cannot be independently reproduced or fraud is discovered. Such a discredited source clearly does not support the claims made, but the average reader without broad knowledge of the literature in the field will not be able to distinguish reputable from discredited articles{{fact}}. For example, most people still believe that unprotected intercourse is to be avoided because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, unaware of the fact that the anti-depressant properties of semen have been known for several years[logic error].[1] Similarly, most laymen are not aware of the fact that the wearing of bras contributes to breast cancer[logic error].[2][3]"
{{fact}} - you would need to cite something to convince me of any of these.
[logic error] - might be true statements, but they do not support the conclusions you draw from them.
I told my students... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, I made it entirely explicit that one cannot cite wikipedia directly in a research paper, just as they couldn't cite the Britannica or the CDROM encyclopaedia they have at home. I was stunned when these supposedly literate, intelligent, creative 19 year-olds had trouble grasping the concept of primary sources--proof to me that public education is really a thinly disguised low-security vocational prison.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think citing sources is vastly overrated. So what if I can find a source that states the first one was built in 1768?
Well, I'm not sure what "vastly overrated" means in your context, but I think citing sources is certainly something that needs to be done.
Will you ever find out that the vast majority of scholars actually agree that the first one was built in 1762? No, because the cited reference won't tell you that. Only a thorough and comprehensive study of the literature in the field will tell you that.
That's a problem with ANY cited source in any source of information. Why cite sources at all then if referencing the source doesn't immediately give you the "right" answer?
You've missunderstood the purpose of checking sources. It's not to give you the perfect answer, but to give someone who cares about accuracy the chance to check (and possibly correct) your sources of information. Without a source to the "The first one was made in 1762" fact, where are you going to even start in trying to verify that?
What's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:2, Insightful)
If for example you run into two cosmologists who don't agree with each other or with the information in Wikipedia, it just might be that they know more than the encyclopedia and are fighting with each other about a theory that only the two of them know about.
I also had a Religion professor who disagreed with most of the people in his field about when the Bible was written down. He claimed that ALL of the OT was oral history before about 685, when it was written down very quickly as Babylonian captivity began. Was he wrong? Who knows. All you can say for sure is that he was an expert, he had his good reasons for believing what he believed, and he disagreed with a lot of people on that topic.
Experts disagreeing with the encyclopedia is a much different thing than a layman disagreeing with the encyclopedia.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
To that end, I think the biggest complaint the history professors would have had would be students citing work that was based on articles that were subjective and questionably biased. It does not seem much different than any of the published works found in a library that could also be just as subjective and biased.
No, that's just plain wrong. There is a much more important difference between wikipedia and the library. Sure, both have lots of subjective and biased information. The key difference is the documentation of the sources involved. For scholarly research the source of your material is as important as its content. It's fine for me to draw on subjective work, so long as I cite it properly and the reader is able to track down the source and check it out for themselves. You could also argue that I need to be objective in interpreting the subjective work of others, but that's still not as important as providing verifiable sources.
The biggest drawback with wikipedia is that you can't do that. The information may be completely accurate and objective, but if you can't give a better source than "HanSolo666" it isn't worth squat.
Wikipedia is still a good starting point, for a quick overview and a pointer to more substantial sources. If you use it that way that's great. However, if your literature search ends at Wikipedia you are not doing legitimate academic research.
yp.
wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen to that. My girlfriend used to live in a commune and the kids in the commune decided to go to high school for the social aspect and universally ended up testing out of it completely (as in, "we don't have anything new to teach you" in spite of the fact that some of them were actually below high school age.
It seems that since these kids had information presented to them in the context of enabling them to do things in which they were interested, they approached learning with the same eagerness as they approached playing games... they were sponges for knowledge. Meanwhile, I was in a GATE program in elementary school and the people running THAT program told me that I couldn't participate in their forays into Astronomy because I was too young. I mean, this is supposed to be the class that helps kids not get held back by the system and what are they doing? Holding me back.
To be fair, that's not entirely their fault... But then again, schools have a disturbing tendency to ignore the issues that lead to the lawsuits, so I guess maybe it is mostly their doing.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:2, Insightful)
This ban should be implied on all papers written after middle school. Go out read an article do your own research don't spit back an entry from world book.
Re:Greatest minds (Score:5, Insightful)
The best scholars have shortcuts to information. Wikipedia is such a shortcut, nicely organized. There are colleagues who frown upon any use of Wikipedia, but they are just snobs, and pissed off that they didn't have such a tool when they were grad students.
Academia contains a shocking number of small-minded people who are scared to death of their students actually learning anything. They really want to pull up the ladder behind them, would just as soon never see one of their students get a PhD. As long as they have a steady stream of cheap grad-student labor to use as research assistants, they keep the most destructive aspects of their own insecurities hidden. Fortunately, there are enough decent department heads and chairs that know this to make sure a reasonable number matriculate, and that a reasonable number of those get jobs.
There are lovely aspects of a life in academia. But there's an ugly underside, too.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
At undergraduate level in the UK there is no need to concentrate on the bias of secondary sources but any bias in primary sources MUST be recognised and commented on as the work produced will be meaningless otherwise. One cannot write an essay about Nero without explaining the hostility of Christian sources or about Domitian without commenting on the bias in Tacitus. At masters level and above all bias is relevant, including your own.
blah, blah, waffle, waffle....I get carried away.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mileage may vary on this sort of treatment by professors (and mine sure does - I was actually the only person to get an "A" in my first college history class because I was the only one who disagreed with my professor's theory). But I don't think anybody's mileage varies on wikipedia - one of the only few facts you can count on it for with 100% certainty is that many articles contain errors. Nobody who uses it on a regular basis would say otherwise.
I don't generally use wikipedia for real research (I'm well out of college and don't work in an academic field, so I don't often need to), so the topics I look up are usually more pop-culture oriented. But my last two searches came up with some pretty egregious errors and/or malicious edits. One of them was the article for WNEW-FM, which recently changed its call letters to WWFS. In two separate places, the article said WWFS "had reluctantly changed" their call letters back to WNEW on April 1, 2007. (This was not just a coincidental typo; there is no such plan by the station. Maybe it's an April Fool's joke.) My previous search was for Ami Onuki, the corresponding article stating that she was divorced - a 2005 internet rumor that has long-since been discredited.
I made edits to both pages removing the offending non-facts. For all I know, whoever made the original edits have put them back since. This is a fundamental problem with wikipedia; it's not that anyone can edit, it's that human nature is often for people to be steadfast in their convictions, even if they're wrong. So while this notion that a large group of people editing articles will eventually result in the best accuracy is a fine ideal, the reality is that a small group of stubborn idiots hellbent on overwriting corrections to "their" pages can ruin it for everybody. That's true of anything in life that's open to the public, it's not just wikipedia. But it does mean that wikipedia can never be considered authoritative. Unfortunately, often the worst people in any community have the last word - and especially on the lesser-trafficked articles.
A perfect example of the best and worst of wikipedia - how it can eventually work but can never be considered authoritative - is the entry for American Airlines flight 191. When I first visited this page, there was a whole mess of misinformation about supernatural nonsense both before and after the crash, and another section listing all sorts of tangential conspiracy theories and connections with 9/11 and even Comair flight 5191 (simply because they both had "191" in the flight number). It read like an article on the Weekly World News. I removed much of this stuff and changed the wording on some of what was left. I noted why I made the changes, saying those sections as written really had no place in an authoritative, factual article on this flight. Almost immediately (the same day), my edits were mostly reversed. An edit war then started, which I stayed out of. Up until the last time I checked, which was just now, those sections had stayed mostly intact.
Finally, though, at least for the moment, it seems that most of the bad info has again been removed and some of my wording is now on the page in what remains. The supernatural section has been renamed "Almost victims and alleged premonitions", although one paragraph remains problematic and is labeled "citation needed" - I consider this paragraph urban legend. It should not be there, at least not as worded. The "history and media" section has had its 9/11 and Comair 5191 references removed.
But after all that, *some* bad info is still there and anyone who visited this page in the meantime would have unknowingly been caught in the middle of an edit war between those who just wanted to present the facts of this crash and those who wanted to present a sensationalized Fox News-style tangle of conspiracy theories and superstitions.
But this is why professors (good ones,
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason I'm not very interested in undergraduate academia anymore is because they don't tell you to get bent often enough. If you can get in, and pay some semblance of attention, you get out with a piece of paper. Is that bloody worthless or what? By lowering the bar so much, there is no real achievement in graduation.
Re:Two problems with wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
However, an academic quality peer review requires that everything be reviewed and accepted/commented/rejected by the world's leading experts in the field - something that is not trivial and we will never see adopted by Wikipedia. Just to be able to identify the relevant experts requires a level of knowledge that just can't be expected for a publication spanning such broad subject matter. This is precisely why the academic journal exists (think Nature, Journal of Applied Physics, etc.)
And so wikipedia will always remain a "mere" encyclopedia. And surely everyone should know that citing an encyclopediqa article just doesn't fly...
Lots of people don't realize this! (Score:2, Insightful)
As has been mentioned way too many times by now, Wikipedia is fine for getting started on research. The nature of Wikipedia is such that it is a collection of information from other sources (sometimes, unfortunately, that source is only the mind of some random internet user). Those sources should (maybe) be cited. Wikipedia should not. (Feel free to use it as a works consulted, though!)
Re:Greatest minds (Score:2, Insightful)
What if the paper were citing Wikipedia policies in a discussion of online communities? There's always an exception.
hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the problem with wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to it. On some subject matters though the people that contribute to wikipedia end up being good references. On other subject matters the wiki can be crap. If you assume that wikipedia is all fact, then you probably do believe everything you read online, in which case by reading this you have contracted a deadly virus and your ears will fall off.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least read what you are citing, will you? "A primary work or even a critical work" - the whole point is that when there is not an objective answer, you have to read multiple sources to get the whole picture, and thus you can't just read Wikipedia.
Re:Primary sources cost money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Primary sources cost money (Score:5, Insightful)
What problem-solving skills would aardvarkjoe use? I would prefer if "problem-solving skills" did not involve copyright infringement or computer network misuse. Or should "problem-solving skills" involve changing the subject, turning a report about a given topic into a report about the holes in a school's journal subscriptions?
There. You now have 9 solutions which use a barometer. I am sure that, even though the school appears to be slightly underfunded, you will be able to obtain more tools than a mere barometer. I have found that telephones, friends (as available), the internet, and money work even better than barometers in many situations.
Re:The bigger problem (Score:3, Insightful)
BUT WHY?!
Give me one good reason why I should not cite an encyclopedia for commonly availible, non-contraversial information?
I double freakin dog dare you.
People like you only say this crap because your teachers drilled it into your head and you never questioned the reasoning behind it.
The REASON why you weren't allowed to cite encyclopedias is so that you would learn how to use a library. Presuming you've now learned how to do that, there's no good reason not to recognize encyclopedias for just what they are: a convenient soure of commonly useful information.
Once your goal is no longer to prove that you can do what your teacher tells you, but to effectively communicate, using commonly availbile, easy to find sources becomes a great idea.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, the issue isn't whether Wikipedia should stand alone as the only reference, the issue is whether the history profs should be able to BAN ALL Wikipedia references because of content concerns.
Re:Primary sources cost money (Score:3, Insightful)