So the deal with Wikipedia, as the three of you who read this may know, is that there's seemingly a problem with it. It's open source utopian stance on editing is wreaking havoc to the point that schools are prohibiting students from using one of the most concise places to find information on the internet. As if the guys who wrote Encyclopedia Brittanica had the purest of intentions. And Wikipedia is currently receiving the Barry Bonds treatment - anything good he does is swept under the rug while all the nasty is newsworthy. Like the religious expert who edited a ton of articles and stubs at the same time as not being a religious expert at all, but rather a 20-something college dropout. That's a more interesting story than "Wikipedia Ain't Bad." Wired Magazine posted a blog about the effectiveness of Wikipedia, and here it is...
It's been fascinating to watch educational institutions wrestle with Wikipedia. While many universities ban it as a research tool (for reasons that are rarely articulated more coherently than "but anybody can edit it!"), many elementary and middle schools are taking a far more progressive stance. Our own kids' elementary school is training the kids to use Wikipedia and other web sites as research tools by teaching them the "two sources" rule. The kids have to find a fact in two independent sources online (and not just the same text repeated in two places) before they can use it in their paper.
What's interesting about this is that the technique comes originally from journalism. The act of interviewing people is inherently tangled up in uncertainty, from correctly understanding what someone said and what they meant to the fact that people are sometimes wrong, confused, lying and intentionally obfuscatory (just like bloggers!). Journalists are trained not to believe things until they have verified them, to do their own research and to connect the dots, extracting signal from the noise.
Those skills are essentially the same ones the Google generation is learning in a world where the greatest information resource of all time--the Web--is also the messiest. Good web research is all about finding your own path and making up your own mind. It's reassuring that elementary school teachers have been among the first to understand this.
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2007/03/teaching_kids_h.html
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2 comments:
I've posted a comment-apology on s.b. forgive me! thus saith dowdy
Well my first thought is what this blog you quote seems to have a rather high view of journalism. Perhaps the IDEAL of journalism is to be thorough and check your facts through different sources, but it's been my obvservation both as a viewer and reader of journalistic sources AND as one who wasted 3 years in ACU's pathetic JMC dept that it's really only 99.5 percent of journalists that give the rest a bad name.
I literall saw on the local news the other night an interview with a local pakistani gas station manager that went something like this:
Reporter: "So sir, basically you were in your store when the man came in waved a gun in your face, yelled at you to get down on the floor, made fun of your mamma, then stole ALL your cash and a candy bar just to be spiteful?"
Confused Pakistani: (nods)
Yeah great interview.
As for Wikipedia, I am the FIRST to be critical of the snot nosed institutions that ARE academia, however when you can literally edit your own source to say what you want it to say, I think it would be academically irresponsible to allow that source to be used. I'd say, you could use it to help lead you to other more credible sources, but if I were teaching I would not allow it to be cited as a source.
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