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.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 so
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.
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?
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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.
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Wikipedia's official [wikipedia.org] policy [wikipedia.org] is that no article may contain information that isn't also published somewhere else. The correct response would be to follow the references cited in the Wikipedia article to the original source of the information. If no source is cited for a given piece
Re:Greatest minds (Score:5, Informative)
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Unless there are theories being formed in the absence of concrete evidence, such as evolution vs intelligent design, most historical information can be classified as either objective or subjective. To that end, I think the biggest complaint the history profes
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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 do
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: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.
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"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 re
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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.
T
Truth does not matter. Verifiability does. (Score:3, Interesting)
It is generally accepted that George Washington was the first president of the US. At what point do you take your reference to or cite that would be authoritive?
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.
Unless you actually witnessed the event yourself, you can not be sure it actually happened as others may have stated.
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
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.
Citation Needed (Score:3, Informative)
Think of it this way: those [citation needed] markers are the first step in getting those sources linked. Their purpose is to encourage people who know something about the issue to provide references. Once those sources are linked, not only does the article have more intrinsic value (as the claims at least have some supporting documentation), but it has more value as a re
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.
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Now, this has been my perception. Mileage may vary... yadda yadda yadda.
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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
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Funny)
Just give me a few seconds, and it will!
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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,
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It would be better to live within your means and have a parent stay at home and provide schooling
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
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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 actu
Seems Consistent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:5, Insightful)
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Add to that the volatility of wikipedia (e.g. you can't reference its contents, since they're always in flux), and its a poor resource of term papers.
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not that you should be citing an encyclopedia anyways, but it is entirely possible as long as the page doesn't get VfD'd between the time you cite it and when you turn in your paper.
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1 - Yes, I agree that considering wikipedia as a source is stupid, just like referencing an encyclopedia is stupid. Wikipedia *specifiaclly bans* original research,
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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 ci
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
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Re:Seems Consistent (Score:4, Informative)
Strongly discouraged is a dramatic understatement. Prohibited is closer to the truth. I can't think of a single course I took in college that would have accepted an encyclopedia reference in a term paper. English, sociology, psychology, World Civ, science (72 crh phy, che, & bio) none of them would have accepted a cite from an encyclopedia for anything more than a copyright notice of a picture you might have included.
In a college level science paper you include only 2 things, independent research - backed by methodology, and peer reviewed papers. The farther you get from hard sciences (where either A + B = C or it doesn't), the lower the peer reviewed requirement at lower levels - IE biographies are rarely peer reviewed, but highly helpful in understanding the importance of the personality traits of people involved in historical events. Even there, at higher levels if you're going to base a thesis on "The impact of GWB's syphalis on his behaviour reguarding the 2nd Iraq war", you're going to need a primary peer reviewed source reporting his syphalis, or independent discovery of his (verifiable) medical records. Bob's History of the Shrub isn't going to cut it.
Re:Seems Consistent (Score:5, Funny)
Use it properly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Use it properly. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not about saying it was harder back in my day. You could even argue it was easier since there wasn'
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Exactly and instead of "banning" it, they should simply educate their students to use proper research materials which would not include encyclopedias or any easily modifiable document, such as a wiki.
My idea (Score:5, Funny)
You know, things like 'Bonito Mussolini was named after a kind of tuna fish. He was born in the year 1726 and died of natural causes 800 years later'.
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There's a place for you on the internet. Uncyclopedia [uncyclopedia.org] is a fine source of misinformation.
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Putting aside the humor for a moment, such info would be self-defeating. Anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention is going to notice the problems. What you need is something more insidious. e.g.:
Why are college students citing encyclopedias? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, we didn't learn that in my elementary school. All throughout school, I used and properly cited encyclopedias for my reports.
With that said, I went to school in California, so it's remarkable that I can tie my own shoes or go to the bathroom without assistance.
Uni students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. (Score:2)
Encyclopedias are meant as guides to further, substantive reading, not end-sin-themselves. The last time I was permitted to rely on an encyclopedia's authority alone was in middle school (age 13).
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Sources (Score:2)
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Good! (Score:2)
And remember, Wikis get vandalized, if you read somethign that SOUNDS acurate, it could just be a good trick that no one has caught yet.
Citing encyclopedias? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Citing encyclopedias? (Score:4, Insightful)
The bigger problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
Frankly. . . (Score:2)
This is not unique (Score:2)
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.
Banned? No, but fail the student (Score:2, Redundant)
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!
Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
You mean the Everywhere Girl is not responsible for the German bombing of Pearl Harbor?
I feel disillusioned.
Role for Wikipedia in academic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wikipedia is often a good starting point... (Score:4, Informative)
And when all I'm interested in is a general overview of something, it's often a good place to go. But I agree that using it as a source for a college paper is unwise. Not just because of the innacuracies, but because when you are doing research, you need to get to original sources. Wikipedia by its very nature is not an original source.
One thing I impressive about Wikipedia is just how obsessively detailed some of the entries are. Some of those details may or may not be correct, but the level of detail is far greater than any encyclopedia I've ever used. And even a detail that's wrong or innacurate still gives you something to look for when you're going over original sources.
Reasonable (Score:2, Redundant)
"Encyclopedias are not a source."
Now repeat again after me:
"Encyclopedias ON THE INTERNET are not a source."
Encyclopedias are a place to start.... (Score:2)
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.
Wikipedia is the new Google (Score:2)
Wikipedia is presently unsuitable for citation because citing means citing an author, not a web page (that can change, I might add). Even if the person doing the citing has the foresight to cite a deep link to a specific versio
Accuracy is an illusion, genuinity double so! (Score:2)
Othewise if you have the original source, you can accurately cite it. If you have not, you end to cite a source claiming to cite an original source. And so on.
In regards to the History, most of the sources either are not original or have a quesitonable genuinity.
Wikipedia is great as it doesn't claim to have accurate information and allows everyone to modify almost everything.
Just like the Hitchhiker's Gu [wikipedia.org]
Surprising. (Score:2)
My courses already have an outright ban on Wikipedia as a research source; most CS professors know how bad it is for edits and will reject it. Social science courses seem to allow it, but once you tell them it can be edited arbitrarily by anyone, they usually tell the course they can no longer use it.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the local paper -- they repeatedly run sidebars on the front page with their citation attributed to Wikipedia. This is a paper with about 400k circulation, too, so not a
They shouldn't ban it (Score:2)
"Every year we get people with inaccuracies from wikipedia. You might not want to use it exclusivly"
If someone tunrs in a paper with incorrect historic information, give them an 'F'.
By college, student certianly should begin seeing consequences like these.
That said. Wikipedia is purprisingle accurate most of the time.
The main exceptions is when someothing suddenly gain mind spaces, or controversial items.
For example, I just looked up the War of 1812, and it seemed to give pretty good informat
Wikipedias plasticity discualifies it academically (Score:2)
While we should not underestimate the value of Wikipedia as a tool for sparking interest, and public information, it is not an scietifict/academic source of information. The shear plasticity of the articles should make it obvious that it is not a
Seems Reasonable (Score:2)
Elephants (Score:2)
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.
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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
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)
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.
Cite the source of the wiki source (Score:3, Informative)
wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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!
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Please. People don't even RTFA most of the time--and that's HYPERLINKED.
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Re:check the sources (Score:5, Informative)
For instance, does your paper need to cite some evidence contrary to your paper, such as opposing viewpoints? Reverted edits or changes that were merged back out can often give you some tips on where to start or what related topics you need to look for.
Re:check the sources (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:textbook replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
priorities! (Score:2)
The average cost of a year of (private) college is $28,000 and rising fast, and you're worried about an extra $150 textbook? Say what?
A dead-tree book is about the most cost-efficient possible way to get an education. Beats the heck out of forking over (assuming you take 8 courses a year, tuition is half the total cost of college, and each course has about 30 one-hour lectures) roughly $1-2 a minute to listen to a lecture on th
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But I object to your concept of linking biasness to pure inaccuracy, as a means to validate the former. Wikipedia, despite reports that suggest it more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica, is user contributed. The process of reviewing the contributions isn't
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While it's true that this is wikipedia's policy, it's only followed on approximately half of the pages on there.