Wikipedia is Not the Enemy

As a TTOC supervising grade 6/7 students’ research into the events of their birth years, I was shocked that they were not allowed to even go near Wikipedia. I tried to explain that they could use it as a secondary source, or as a starting point, or just to get ideas, but they were resistant. They were clearly very well indoctrinated against the website. However, they were fully allowed to use Google (and not taught that Google isn’t itself a resource), and in trying to avoid Wikipedia so completely, they ended up on some even more suspicious pages. I wanted to come back the next day and throttle their teacher, or at least leave an irate post-it on their desk (I did neither, of course). The anti-Wikipedia crusade is based on an over-generalization and facile understanding of the actual mechanics of the website.

Wikipedia can be good for students! Students who are looking for information on a personal question, or just looking for general/conceptual information, or who are looking for names and dates, should be encouraged to use the world’s largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia.

I have often heard that “anyone can write anything” on Wiki. That’s an over-generalization. It’s not like Facebook or other social media where everything anyone writes shows up on the page. A person has to register as a user, and their changes have to be approved by the Wiki community. People with throwaway accounts or who haven’t built up enough reliability are not allowed to edit articles directly. People with more reliable information or a better track record are allowed more access, and obvious errors are corrected pretty quickly. By the time you hear about some “hacker” changing something on a Wiki page, it’s already been deleted or reverted to an older, more correct version. Wikipedia will also lock pages that are repeatedly “vandalized” in this way. Wikipedia has checks and balances that maintains accuracy. It’s not just “crowd-sourced,” but also “crowd-reviewed” and edited.

As a learning support teacher, I often encourage students to use Wikipedia because it tends to be written with more accessible language. ELL students can read articles translated into their first language, to help them understand the concepts covered in class. Moreover, even though Simple English Wiki has fewer articles, the ones they do have are much more accessible for my students who do not read at grade level.

The vast majority of Wikipedia articles are written by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about their topics. Furthermore, all of the information within the Wiki requires citation. A student might start at the Wiki page and scroll down to find the “real” sources that they may use for their research.

There are so many advantages of using Wikipedia, at least as a jumping-off point, that I get upset when I hear that other teachers refuse to let students use it. It’s great for quick answers, for starting searches, for filtering and focus of topics, and for meta-cognitive tasks such as evaluating a source and learning how and when to use different resources.