It seems as though Middlebury College isn’t the only one. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come, with more professors making it clear that they will not accept Wikipedia as a cited source.

It certainly appears to be a growing trend of bloggers and “journalists” opening with misleading headlines. The Cornell Daily Sun’s Ben Eisen writes of professors who will not allow Wikipedia to be cited. Yet even the profs agree that Wikipedia has its realm of usefulness.

Cornell history professor Aaron Sachs:
“I tell my students that Wikipedia is sometimes a decent option for a
getting a basic overview,” he said. “But even then it takes a lot of
practice to recognize when an entry might be more or less reliable.”

Eisen does quote students in his story, however, which gives a more well-rounded perspective:

“I will use Wikipedia if I need to look up an equation or if I want to
get background information before starting my research, but I wouldn’t
ever cite it in a paper,” said Michael Lazar.

The understanding of Wikipedia’s limitations seems to come from many arenas. “(E)ven Jimmy Wales, the site’s co-founder, says that neither Wikipedia —
nor any other encyclopedia — should be used as an academic source.” (from Eisen)

What about high schools? Those teachers who require research of any kinds have already encountered Wikipedia in the Works Cited page. Is it worth “taking a stand” and making a clear ban on citing it? I’m starting to think so, under one huge condition: that we, as educators, do a better job of explicitly teaching our students how to evaluate sources for reliability and validity.

I hear the voices now…”I’ve been doing that for years!” Yes, so have I. But web sources like Wikipedia are a brave new world that few of us teachers have sought to understand. If we are going to teach students how to be evaluators (or “editors” as Will Richardson calls them), then we must first understand how these new tools work and how they are different from the sources of even a year or two ago.