Misou's Journal: Hero of the day: Dr. Neal Waters and the Middlebury

Great minds produce great art. And what else could blunt a great mind better than misinformation!

In a consequent move history Professor Neil Waters of the Middlebury Art College the Vermont got his colleagues to approve a policy which bans students from using Wikipedia for their class papers: "I realized that it wasn't just a problem of citations but also that students were using it to study for exams because of its convenience--and in the process absorbing nuggets of misinformation". As the New York Times reports: "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. He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam."

Also Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, blows the same horn: "College students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in their papers," he said. "That's not what college is about. They either should be using primary sources or serious secondary sources."

Lisa Hinchliffe, head of the undergraduate library and coordinator of information literacy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that earlier generations of students were in fact taught when it was appropriate (or not) to consult an encyclopedia and why for many a paper they would never even cite a popular magazine or non-scholarly work. "But it was a relatively constrained landscape," and students didn't have easy access to anything equivalent to Wikipedia, she said. "It's not that students are being lazy today. It's a much more complex environment." When she has taught, and spotted footnotes to sources that aren't appropriate, she's considered that "a teachable moment," Hinchliffe says.

Why are students using Wikipedia at all? Just lazyness and maybe they never learned to research something on their own. "Students are responsible for the accuracy of the information they give," says Waters. "They can't say, 'I saw it on Wikipedia and therefore that shields me.'" The departmental statement at Middlebury College also forbids students from including Wikipedia in lists of bibliographic sources. According to Middlebury student Eliza Murray ('08), the burden rests with students themselves to learn the difference between credible and non-credible sources. "There are so many other, more legitimate sources to cite," she said. "Why would you cite Wikipedia?"

Sources:
www.middlebury.edu
www.schoollibraryjournal.com
www.nytimes.com
www.insidehighered.com
www.uiuc.edu
media.www.middleburycampus.com
misou.info