Wikipedia has become the bugbear of teachers at many schools when it comes to student use of the internet for research. When I started at my present school in 2009, it was obvious that my students were unlikely to give up using Wikipedia simply because we wanted them to. The solution, I decided, was to convince them that they should not reference it and that it should only be used as a jumping off point in their research. On our libguides, I made sure that students always received the following advice:
School Policy on Wikipedia: Read for background but do not cite!
Rule No. 1: Use Wikipedia as a starting point for your research, but don't cite it unless you can exhaustively demonstrate that it is the only authoritative source on a particular issue.
Unfortunately, a few students decided that the policy meant that they could use the information from Wikipedia but that they didn’t need to reference it. Thus we added rule 2 and 3:
Rule No. 2: Re: Rule No. 1: That doesn't mean that you should use the information from Wikipedia anyway and just not cite it. It means that you should find other research sources. Encyclopedias are only meant as starting points! For example, you could find the bibliography in the Wikipedia article and look at the sources that the author of the article used. You could also look to see if there is a list of links. Check those out as well.
Rule No. 3: If you are unsure, ask your teacher or librarian!
Over the years I have become a more sophisticated user of Wikipedia. Furthermore, I have carried out my own research into Wikipedia and its use in academic research. I can’t say in what order any of this happened. However, I have recently come across a number of university libguides which include information and videos on the use of Wikipedia for research; and I have used them with my senior students.
Below is an example of a video from the University of New Brunswick in Canada
I have also taken on board some of my own observations to improve how I carry out research. Initially, I read an article for background and then checked out the references and the links. Later, I realised that the articles often gave me search terms I could use in furthering my search for information sources. Finally, it wasn’t till I discovered Mike Canfield and SIFT, and later the Civil Online Reasoning course from Stanford that I realised Wikipedia’s value in fact checking sources.
And now for the ‘more’. We tell our students not to use Wikipedia and yet many teachers seem happy to accept websites which might be judged as equally or more dubious. From a recent history assignment, I found the following:
https://www.history.co.uk/ : a website originating in the United States and created by the Arts and Entertainment Network
https://www.biography.com/ : also from the Arts and Entertainment Network
https://www.ducksters.com/ : Little detail is given on the authors of the information on this website. In their defence they do give a works cited list for some of the articles. However, in the geography section the information source for Taiwan is over 10 years old.
There are many websites, which student researchers come across which fall into the same category as those above. I have started to include a list of such websites on our libguides (see example below). I am hoping that teachers will also include them on the task sheets they prepare for any research assignment.
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