knowledge of hundreds
One of the widely reported issues surrounding Wikipedia is its utility as a research tool for children (and, sadly, undergrads). I finished high school before Netscape Navigator was released, so the idea of using the Web as a tool for grade school research isn’t really on my radar. Thinking back, I remember being pretty reliant on encyclopedias for school projects, but it’s a little hard for me to see teachers and parents encouraging students to use anything on the Web as a reference. As I’ve mentioned before, Wikipedia has a page that provides suggestions for students and teachers on how Wikipedia should be used in research. It seems like this page is either too hard to find for teachers and reporters, or news reports just ignore these suggestions.
Anyway, I ran across yet another newspaper article about the problems Wikipedia presents for school research. I get a little frustrated with these stories, since it’s clear to me that Wikipedia should only be cited as a source if you’re writing about Wikipedia. The article raises a good point about kids and Wikipedia that hadn’t occurred to me.
Ray Baker wrote that his son was doing a school report on salmon and used Yahoo! to search for information. “I was shocked by how many porn sites use normal everyday words as keywords, so a search will pick them up,” Baker said. After that, his son used Google to search, and one of the articles listed was in Wikipedia.
The article was well-written, Baker said, and the included outside links made it a valuable resource. He continued, “In my opinion, Wikipedia should be used in every school. Yes, some articles are not the best, but for the most part, it provides a wealth of information
and is constantly being updated — proof that ‘open source’ projects work and work very well.”
I’m a little concerned about the prospect of salmon fetish sites, but, on the whole this was enlightening. Now that Wikipedia has been agressive about requiring references, students can use it as a repository of links to other information and steer clear of porn for the most part.
