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?
Why are college students citing encyclopedias? (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop Citing wikipedia! (Score:2, Interesting)
I know many of my peers that use it religiously, and many of those papers are practically clones. However, if my lecturers started to try and stop the use Wikipedia for material, I'll be the first to point out that little hypocritical rule. My lectures use Wikipedia abundantly in their hand-outs, notes and references to their own work when lecturing!
Re:The bigger problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:3, Interesting)
They will be explaining why material on Wikipedia may not be trustworthy. If they do this, then why do they need to ban Wikipedia from being used as a source. Shouldn't explaining Wikipedia's role and saying, "There are very few situations where it is acceptable to use Wikipedia, so if you want to be safe, just don't cite it as a source," be good enough to stop this so-called "problem"?
And on that note, what makes a school changing its citation policy newsworthy? English departments do this from time to time and citation policies can change drastically from one professor to the next. Just because the source in question here is Wikipedia doesn't make it special. The students at this school have not been taught how to use sources properly, so the school needs to teach them instead of making a publicity stunt out of it.
Re:Sources (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:2, Interesting)
What Wikipedia Is Good For And What It Is Not..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Using Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is just asking for a problem. The Professors have every argument prohibiting it's use as a source or citation in reports. It's simply too inaccurate, and, from the student's vantage point, impossible to tell what and where *exactly* innacuracies are.
I would NEVER and HAVE NEVER used Wikipedia as a 'source' of information. The only things I use it for is if I want to get a basic hold on a subject that I don't anything about. If you want accurate, buy the World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica encyclopedias.
Special Peer-Reviewed Article Revisions. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be neat if a group of accredited individuals would be willing to take the time to review certain popular articles and make expert revisions and release a "green" revision of an article. There could be a link on the article page saying, "click here for the peer-reviewed revision from 11-29-06" or something to that nature.
"The Internet is unreliable" (Score:2, Interesting)
Two problems with wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Rapidly changing content. Can be resolved be identifying which specific version is being referred to, like any other resource.
2. Not authoritative. University level educators usually prefer only peer-reviewed material to be cited, or material to have been checked by some reasonably trustworthy rigourous procedure. This is where Wikipedia is potentially weakest, or perhaps most challenging of the traditional model.
I can understand the college making its life easier by a blanket ban on Wikipedia, it's up to Wikipedia to raise its standards to be acceptable to academic institutions.
In a number of cases I know of high quality articles, for example where the primary authors are world-renown in the field they are writing on. But the amount of work required to identify high quality articles is probably still too great for a harassed lecturer who has a hundred essays to mark amongst a thousand other jobs, I can understand them falling back on only accepting from known sources.
My question would be: what does Wikipedia have to do to become accepted as an academic source?
Students should contribute more (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps it is time to 'give back' (Score:2, Interesting)
one opposing viewpoint (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Everything! (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, I am not a fanboi, I do understand the concern for accuracy. But to outright ban it? Wikipedia is my first and usually last source on anything, mainly because I just use it to learn for myself, not for a paper or whatever, and because its got a consistent, easy to use interface. I do try google to find my information but I find so many sites that tell you the same thing again, in different words, that its not worth trying to see if "Wikipedia was wrong".
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hear you on that one. My wife teaches our 10 year old daughter at home. We have felt that it is the best in the long run, because we can tailor her learning to her individual learning style. We also get the added benefit of picking the curriculum. I was actually quite suprised at the number of high quality teaching texts available, which public school systems seem to ignore (probably through sheer laziness of the purchaser). My daughter has the advantage of being able to take science classes with marine biologists at our local aquarium, as well as ecology/botany classes with a wildlife biologist at a local state park.
The issue of one income is a tough one, however I was fortunate enough to A.) never had two incomes (she went to college, then we had a child) and B.) I make a decent living.
I think public schools are just becoming free daycare centers. I am in the fortunate position of having friends who teach in the public school system, at the elementary and high school level, and it makes me thankful that my wife is passionate about teaching our daughter. The problems they have with school administrators/parents/children are unbelievable. It seems that schools are more interested in not getting sued, than actually teaching children.
To anyone in this forum thinking about homeschooling your children, I say it is rewarding, but check your local laws. Some States, here in the US, are quite hostile towards homeschooling, and other States are quite supportive.
Re:The bigger problem (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a doctoral student in networking. Last year, I had occasion to write an online survey paper on networking traffic models. I used primary sources for everything I could find, and then I used secondary sources for a few papers that were unavailable. During peer review, a few readers complained that I didn't provide derivation or citation for things I'd consider to be required background material (such as the mean inter-arrival time for exponentially distributed arrivals). For those points, I provided a link to the relevant Wikipedia article on, say, the Exponential Distribution [wikipedia.org]. These were all collected in a dedicated “Informational Resources” section, and were all from Wikipedia.
They weren't exactly citations, they were more a matter of, “If you're reading this paper and you lack the fundamental background, here's where you can catch up.”
I wonder if that use would fall under the ban in TFA?
Re:Use it properly. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not about saying it was harder back in my day. You could even argue it was easier since there wasn't nearly as much noise back then.
We use it instead of a textbook (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use it properly. (Score:2, Interesting)
For my two cents writing research papers is Academic Hazing and has no real value in undergraduate or professional level education.
Primary sources cost money (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with this in principle, as any encyclopedia is a tertiary source. But if a student wants to read and cite a primary source that the institution's library doesn't have an annual subscription to, what should the student do?
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:2, Interesting)
Who won the First World War?
Most US/UK/French people asked would say "We did". The 'truth' is that no-one won WWI: it was a draw. All combatants agreed to stop fighting on 11/11/1918. The fact that Germany was royally shafted afterwards is a separate issue. The lie that Germany was beaten in WWI persists to this day and says quite a lot about our own need for self-validation.
History is not about dates and battles, these are the punctuation in the story of our time on Earth. The real history is what lies between them - power, money, greed, lust, fear, anger and struggle. All good stuff and quite entertaining.
Truth does not matter. Verifiability does. (Score:3, Interesting)
To back up an assertion that George Washington held the first office of POTUS and that George H. W. Bush held the 41st, we can cite a page on whitehouse.gov [whitehouse.gov]. If someone later discovers whitehouse.gov to be unreliable, the article remains open to competing sources added to the article or (in cases of the most often vandalized articles) to the article's talk page.
Wikipedia doesn't give a d*mn about truth [wikipedia.org]. The goal of an encyclopedia is collection of verifiable information. For instance, the scientific theories of aether [wikipedia.org], phlogiston [wikipedia.org], and heat as a fluid [wikipedia.org] are no longer considered "true", but it is verifiable that at one time, those theories were widely accepted.
Sounds about right to me...but... (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH: What *IS* a primary source? If you're an archaeologist, it's going on a dig, and it's what *YOU* dig up. Then there's what someone you know well claims to have dug up. But do notice that these primary sources are:
1) limited, and
2) not dated.
Well, in chemistry or physics, it's the experiments that you, yourself, have performed. Much more widely replicable, but the subtlties of interpretation are dictated by the texts you have read. (They *SHOULDN'T* determine the result...but I occasionally repeated experiments until I got the results that I *ought* to get.) Texts, again, are not primary sources.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of BioChemistry (at Columbia?) and he wrote an couple of articles on tracing plagerism in textbooks by the errors that they include. Textbooks seems to rarely be primary sources. (My favorite was called "The Sound of Panting". I don't know if it's currently available.)
Stephen J. Gould wrote an article on tracing the heritage of scientific articles by the metaphors that they used. I forget it's title. Again the theme was how rarely articles, books, etc. were written relying solely on primary sources.
So library books aren't primary sources either. Neither textbooks not journal articles. Some of them may be first generation copies, but you can't easily tell. And then there's the cases of scientists with reputations who make up their facts. (Medwar?)
Primary sources are definitely preferable. But when it costs a few million to run the experiment there are few students that can afford them. (I'm thinking Tevatron, etc., here.)
So the question, then, is more "How do you validate the trustworthiness of you data sources?" (After all, that's *why* primary sources are better.)
We shouldn't use "real" encyclopedias either... (Score:3, Interesting)
But perhaps more importantly, the information contained in any encyclopedia is usually a summary of sorts, based on information gathered from a multitude of more credible and valuable sources. A WikiPedia entry is therefore, in many ways, like a student's paper turned into a professor for grading: someone did a little research, organized their findings into a convenient arrangement, and turned it in (with the chance of the effort being rejected).
So, what role should WikiPedia play in education? As a guide, at most. A WikiPedia entry, like any good encyclopedia entry, will associate its topic with various keywords and other topics relevant to the research. And always, always check the citations!