Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?

Do you know what tools your students are using for information searching? Are you concerned about the quality and reliability of the sources they find? Is forbidding the use of Wikipedia as a resource for student research project a good solution? This page includes a brief selective bibliography of publications about Wikipedia, ideas for assignments and class discussions that will help students think critically about Wikipedia and suggestions for those who would like to start their own wikis for for teaching and collaboration.

Some resources and ideas on this page have been suggested by subscribers of the ILI-L listserv, a discussion forum on information literacy and library instruction.

Selected publications about Wikipedia

7 Things You Should Know About... Wikipedia. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, June 2007. (Online).

ABC News stories about Wikipedia.

"After Flap over Phony Academic Credentials, Wikipedia to Ask Some Writers to Share Real Names." The Age Online, March 8, 2007. (Online).

New program color-codes text in Wikipedia entries to indicate trustworthiness. UC Santa Cruz press release, August 2, 2007.
(Online).

"Wikipedia a Pariah? Not Really, Say Campus Interviewees." Library Journal Academic Newswire. April 5, 2007. (Online).

NEW! Badke, William, " What to Do With Wikipedia." ONLINE. Vol. 32 No. 2 — Mar/Apr 2008. (Online).

Borland, John. "See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign". Wired News, August 14, 2007. (Online).

Cohen, Noam. "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively." New York Times 156.53839 (2007): C3-C3. March 15, 2007. Read this article in LexisNexis Academic.(Off-campus access required).

Cohen, Noam. "Identity fraud sinks Wikipedia contributor." The International Herald Tribune, March 7, 2007, Section: FINANCE; Pg. 13. Read this article in LexisNexis Academic. (Off-campus access required).

NEW! Cohen, Noam. " Open-Source Troubles in Wiki World." New York Times, March 17, 2008, Section: TECHNOLOGY. (Online). Note: This articel generated a lot of comments. Read the comments and post yours.

Lanier, Jaron. Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. Edge, May 30, 2006. (Online). See also responses to this essay.

Read, Brock. Middlebury College History Department Limits Student' Use of Wikipedia. Chronicle of Higher Education 53.24 (2007): A39-A39. Academic Search Premier. 15 March 2007. (Online).

Read, Brock. Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 10, Page A31. (Online).

Rosenzweig, Roy. "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past." Journal of American History, June 2006. Read this article in ProQuest Research Library. (Off-campus access required).

Schiff, Stacy. Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise? New Yorker, 21 July 2006. (Online).
(Don't miss the editors' note at the end of the article).

Seigenthaler, John. "A false Wikipedia 'biography'." USA Today, November 29, 2005. (Online).

NEW! Wilcom, Chris. "The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy." Slate Magazine, February 22, 2008 (Online).

 

Ideas for assignments or library session demonstrations/activities

• NEW! Top 10 Wikipedia Tricks - great ideas for Wikipedia-related projects.
• NEW! Brockhaus, Andreas, and Martha Groom. "Using Wikipedia to Reenvision the Term Paper" (presentation at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Conference).
  

  "To make the assignment more meaningful, students published their papers in Wikipedia. This session will examine how publishing for a large online community motivated students to do better work and deal with issues of voice, knowledge, and community" (from the session description).

• NEW! Refer to the Wikipedia page on school and university projects involving Wikipedia.
  From the page description: " If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university, we encourage you to use Wikipedia in your class to demonstrate how an open content website works (or doesn't)."
  • Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for teachers and lecturers (Wikipedia page)
  • Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students (Wikipedia page)
• Discuss some of the publications listed above with the students.
• Have your students watch the following Colbert reports on Wikipedia: Wikiality and Wikilobbying (do a Google search for colbert wikiality or colbert wikilobbying).
  (UC instruction librarians have done class demonstration with subsequent discussions on multiple occasions).
• Show the students two of the entries that Stephen Colbert altered while doing his show The Colbert Report. The links below are archived versions of the page so you can see how it looked when it was done (and it is a static link):
  • George Washington.http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Washington&oldid=66945427.
    At the end of the section on "Washington and Slavery" that covers his slave holdings Colbert enters "In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves." 
  • African Elephant.http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=African_elephant&oldid=67042225. At the end of the first section Colbert enters "Contrary to what most environmentalists say, the population of African Elephants is on the rise. It has actually tripled in the last six months."
    (From Bill Easton, Monterey Peninsula College <mailto:librarykahuna@yahoo.com>)
• Suggest that the students read the 3 Wikipedia disclaimer pages:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer (the general disclaimer)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use (a discussion of the appropriate use of any general encyclopedia in the academic research process)
  http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer (a “simple English” version of the disclaimers that includes some very strongly-worded statements).
  ( From Cheryl McCain, University of Oklahoma Libraries < mailto:clmccain@ou.edu>)
• Ask the students to analyze a Wikipedia entry and/or history of the entry.
  Particularly good examples are history pages on controversial topics. In the history, there is usually some commentary about edits being made (vandalism, lacking citation links, etc.). Sometimes you can see that the page was 'protected' from edits after some serious 'edit warring'.
  (From Tricia Juettemeyer <mailto:tjuettemeyer@gmail.com>)
• Compare a biographical entry in Wikipedia and entries for the person in other biographical sources, for example, American National Biography.
• Show the edit history of a Wikipedia entry and get information on some of the article's contributors.
  (From Sue Gallaway <mailto:sgallaway@centralia.edu> )
• Edit Wikipedia articles on the fly in front of a class (pick an article in advance and find some meaningful way to edit it).
  (From Sue Gallaway <mailto:sgallaway@centralia.edu> )

Create Your Own Wiki

Wikis in Higher Education: Pros, Cons, and How-To's (PDF document)

CET&L page about Wikis

UC Second Life Wiki

If you would like to submit a resource for including in this page or comment on the page content, please send the information to Olga.Hart@uc.edu.