Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?

Londovir asks: "Recently, our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction. The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools. Should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?"

Of Course They Should

Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?

They should make a big deal about blocking Wikipedia--announce it to the student body. Then tell students that they are forbidden from accessing it at all. Pick some other sites too, like MySpace or Hotmail or a news site like CNN or the BBC News.

Then turn around and in the students' social studies classes, teach them about free speech and the horrors of censorship. Be sure to explain what rights an American Citizen has and how many people have demonstrated or fought and died for these rights to remain intact.

Then sit back and wait. Wait for the students to put this together and realize that they don't have to put up with your censorship shit.

When someone holds a demonstration, make a big deal about it and herald them for being an American Citizen. Ask the rest of the students why they waived their right to read Wikipedia as free speech. Who cares why they wanted to read it or even whether they wanted to read it all, just ask them why they waived a right they knew they had. Make them think about it.

Then, if you've got enough time, ask yourself why you've been waiving so many rights in the name of The DMCA, The Patriot Act & The Patriot Act II. Why did you waive your rights in the name of national security and the comfort of huge corporations?

Go ahead, take your time.

If you're advocating blocking Wikipedia in a serious manner, please do explain how you're going to--at the same time--teach the students about the rights they have. It will entertain me, the excuses that fascists come up with always have.

"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.

As for the person asking the question, I don't know about you but I went to a high school where the first thing we were taught is that we are responsible for the information we present in a paper. The student is responsible for citing sources & verifying that the source is reliable. If you can't do that, you're going to end up reading The Onion with either hilarious or catastrophic results. This is a valuable life lesson, let the students learn it early when the consequence is a bad grade instead of a lawsuit. If you told the students Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, give them an F if they use one single reference from it. How can they argue with you, the instructor?

I wish I had mod points

That is one insightful post.

You, sir, are a genius.

You are one of the few that "gets it".

Re:I wish I had mod points

There is no code to detect "mediocrity".

There is no code to detect "conformity".

Only slashdot users are to blame for the moderation system. You and me are both part of that system, so you and me are to blame.

Re:Of Course They Should

Then, if you've got enough time, ask yourself why you've been waiving so many rights...

How about, "the faster we hit rock bottom, the sooner the mobs with pitchforks will rise up?"

Re:Of Course They Should

I work in a large school district IT Department. We block plenty of sites, including MySpace and Facebook, (though we don't block Wikipedia).

Generally, the feeling among us here is that if we receive a complain about a website, we will examine it. We won't block non-porn sites until we receive complaints, and the website has to have no educational value for us to consider blocking.

Re:Of Course They Should

You seemed to have misunderstood this statement:

"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.

Just because a few people complain doesn't mean that blocking is good. Furthermore, to say that sites like MySpace have no educational value is to imply that no student will ever have a need to research and report on them - them being a huge, culture-changing phenomenon. Sure, I'll agree as much as the next that MySpace and FaceBook aren't, at face value, educational, but who am I to say that others won't learn something from them?

Re:Of Course They Should

Your argument makes sense in a corporate environment where we depend on managers being effective at understanding how their subordinates work, but in schools teachers do not understand how students do. The playing field is not level.

Teachers depend on IT to do the work they want to do but don't know how to: stop the students from using the computers to waste time every time they turn around. People don't pay tax dollars so that we can let students post whiney blogs about how few people are friending them on myspace. Obviously IT can't decide case-by-case to block, so we have to make smart blocking rules.

It's not like this is an Orwellian scheme of oppression, this is about making effective efficient classrooms that don't waste taxpayer time and money on things students have every capability to do at home in their free time. It's not like we block e-mail or anything, this is no brain stuff. People can still go to Digg and Slashdot and blogspot, etc. These all have SOME redeeming qualities.

Public education has nothing to do with sending gossipy messages over myspace though, no matter how much of a phenomenon it is.

All that said, Wikipedia does not fit our guidelines. Regardless of accuracy, Wikipedia is nothing but an educational source.

Re:Of Course They Should - NOT

Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking??? Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations. It is precisely the free and open access to information that we in the USA enjoy (and that China lacks) that makes this country and our students some of the most creative and imaginative in the world. NEVER destroy that freedom!

Re:Of Course They Should - NOT

As a high school student, I might be able to provide some insight into this. A lot of people know that Wikipedia and such are not acceptable sources, those that don't learn quickly. There's about a 90% chance that anyone after the first half of their freshman year who cites Wikipedia just doesn't care, or is trusting their luck that their teacher won't notice (Has happened once or twice, not a lot though). If someone cites Wikipedia or sites like it gets a lower grade, though by how much depends on the teacher.

In any case, "Inappropriate" sites are blocked (Myspace, pr0n, etc.), but Wikipedia is wide open. Anyone with any technical skill can get around the filter, though, so it's pretty effective, but enough people know how to that if they did something like block Wikipedia, it'd be useless anyway.

One of the things Wikipedia is good for is finding links to more reliable sites, and finding books to look up, as you said, at the library.

Re:Of Course They Should - NOT

One of the things Wikipedia is good for is finding links to more reliable sites, and finding books to look up, as you said, at the library.

Wikipedia is a perfectly valid source of research information if it is coroberated by other sources JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE. The encyclopedia may be wrong, the textbook may be wrong, the dictionary may be wrong, books in the library may be wrong, and wikipedia may be wrong. In all probability they won't all be wrong.

If the schools aren't teaching students about fact checking and judging the reliability of a source, they are failing. Unfortunatly, that is exactly the case. That's why adults, after 12 years of schooling, still can't see through all of the political lies out there, spot bias in media or even realise that commercials are full of crap.

The better approach would be for schools to actually do their jobs and provide students with a solid foundation in fact checking and then ENCOURAGE them to consider wikipedia as a potential source. Any research paper that relies on a single source, no matter what that source is, should lose points. The only exception is cases where there is only one source. In that case, the paper should reflect an appropriate skepticism.

These are skills that every single person needs to have if they are to participate meaningfully in our democracy or in our economy. Simply blocking Wikipedia and teaching a doctrine of encyclopedic infallibility [wikipedia.org] is a huge failure.

Source of All Knowledge

Yes let's block Wikipedia, because of the possibility of misinformation.
Let's also block forums discussing any such information due to the possibility of student's receiving misinformation.
Let's also block any sites which have any information which disagrees with the school's policies.
Let's also block sites which disagree with the policies of people or governments we are directly associated with.
Let's force student's to use a specially crafted search engine to remove such misinformed sites given by other search engines such as Google (This has actually happened).
Let's block every site and only allow sites which match our policy.
Let's remove our internet connection and simply have an intranet filled with all our correct information which has been checked by the school to be correct, and of course, the school is the source of all knowledge of everything that is correct and right. After all, it has to be true; I found it out at http: //10.0.0.1/library/sourceofallknowledge

Re:Of Course They Should - NOT

Is something written on paper better reviewed, researched or accurate. Most schools libraries are underfunded and out of date.

The answer is that unlike Wikipedia, books have known authors (and I'm talking about factual books here), known publishers and editors who are answerable for errors of fact, and do not change moment by moment in response to ignorance, prejudice, "the wisdom of crowds" or whatever bullshit arguments are used including appeals to "community", appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, appeals to bizarre and slippery concepts like NPOV, "notability" or anything else.

That isn't to say that books are perfect or that they are not in need of revision and update, but its a whole lot better than the spectacular MMORPG of human knowledge known as Wikipedia.

Re:Take an honest look

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.

The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.

Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy."

- 1984 by George Orwell.

Taxpayer efficiency over student education!?

People don't pay tax dollars so that we can let students post whiney blogs about how few people are friending them on myspace. . . . this is about making effective efficient classrooms that don't waste taxpayer time and money

Wow. You take my breath away. How does one respond to such an incredible warping of the purpose of school? What the hell do TAXPAYERS have to do with it?

I thought school was supposed to be about the education of students, for their benefit, that of their parents, of other citizens, and of society and democracy at large.

Not that I think schools actually do this; I would say on balance they achieve the opposite. But to actually state that the goal of public education is the efficient satisfaction of taxpayers (not citizens, parents, or God-forbid students; learning, citizenship, and the improvement of students are nowhere to be found) is so ass-backwards it's virtually guaranteed to never achieve actual education or fulfill the interests of students.

Of course, to the extent that you're a politico or functionary dependen on an industrial system of public education for your power and income, your characterization of education may be in your personal interest. What you wrote thoroughly confuses the private benefit of public servants with the broader public interest. I sincerely hope this is an accident of your writing and a product of having to cope with an imperfect system, not what you actually believe or practice.

None of which is to argue that schools are better with or without MySpace. Addressing that question requires a much more thorough analysis than the caricature you've presented here: of what we as a society want our schools to achieve, of the degree to which school should be isolated from real life and of the practical questions of how school can teach students to function in their actual lives, of whether it's better to try to change the student than to train the teacher, of the potential and actual nature of social sites (socialization is, after all, one of the main things we want out of schools), and of the practical dimensions of any relevant policy. In other words, I don't have an answer but I don't think you've made an argument.

Re:Taxpayer efficiency over student education!?

In other words, I don't have an answer but I don't think you've made an argument.

I wasn't making an argument, I was giving a rationale. School simply do not have the money to retrain every single teacher who isn't really interested in learning in the first place. To make matters worse, they are unreplaceable due to union contracts... it doesn't matter how poorly trained they are for today's technology, they're here to stay because of the union.

I was explaining that while people here are debating about the good or bad ways that a school district trys to engineer students, the reason has nothing to do with engineering of students, and everything to do with the path of least resistance and least cost. Businesses work on cost-profit ratios, public services work on cost-benefit ratios. I never said it was the way it should be, I said it was the way it is.

I hate working for a public agency personally. I think we do some of the stupidest things for the most arbitrary reasons, and no one here has any focus on what our purpose is supposed to be: education. Especially in IT, which is purely administrative, we very rarely ask if we are doing something because it benefits us or the students.

Re:Manganese

At a former workplace, I tried to google for "python scripting trim whitespace". The page was blocked. I asked the owner of the company (who set up the blocking software out of the box) and he responded with "Animals have nothing to do with your job. Writing screenplays have nothing to do with your job. And I definitely will not tolerate my employees looking at websites of racist organizations."

Solomon

You're missing WHY the students are giving up that

You're missing why the students are willing to give up their right to wikipedia: if teachers can't check wikipedia at school it's much harder to notice that they just copied their paper from wikipedia :P

Oh bloody please

Geeze, it never ceases to amaze me the chest-thumping some people do about their rights, without even knowing what those rights are. They think their amendments apply to anything except the government, and gives them some right to troll a board or to read Slashdot/Wikipedia/whatever at work/school/whatever.

Learn your _real_ rights, lemming, because believing in such stupidities is how you lose those rights. Since you ask that, yes, ask yourself why so many rights were so easily taken away. Because 90% of the population doesn't even know them. They think the constitution gives them a right to troll a privately own message board, or to slander the neighbour, or to cheat on WoW, or whatever. Joe Random Voter doesn't even comprehend that those rights, or that they apply to the government (au contraire, he thinks his free speech applies to everything _but_ his government), or what they really were supposed to protect. He's too busy exercising his imaginary rights, to care about the _real_ ones.

Here's the actual first amendment text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Get this:

- It's about laws passed by Congress. Wake me up when Congress makes a law that forbids you to say something at all, not when an IT department blocks Wikipedia on their network. I don't see anywhere there that students are forbidden to read Wikipedia at home, or that police will take anyone to Guantanamo for reading Wikipedia. Just that it's blocked on the school network. That's it.

- It's _only_ about your relationship to the Congress and laws. It doesn't mean anyone else than Congress should have _any_ obligation to you. Not even public schools or government departments owe you jack shit on their premises or network. Whether it's free speech, or the right to peacefully demonstrate, or to petition for redress, get this: noone else has an obligation to provide you with the means or time for it. Your boss or school do not have to participate in a demonstration, don't have to pay for your bandwidth to exercise your free speech, nor let you spend your work/class time surfing the net. They don't have to do _anything_ for you. It doesn't even say they can't fire you for it.

- "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. It just says that noone will lock-up the Wikipedia owners for being anti-Bush. It does _not_ say that anyone has an obligation buy and deliver the New York Times to your doorstep, or Wikipedia to your desktop. If your boss or the school principal doesn't want to carry those packets to you, tough shit, it's up to you to get them in your free time.

- sorta unrelated, but that's another confusion that chest-thumpers do: no, it also doesn't mean anyone has to publish or carry your speech either. If you want to see your stuff in print, buy a newspaper. If you want them on a server, buy a server. And if the IT department doesn't route your precious corrections to Wikipedia, tough shit, get your own Internet connection at home.

And spare me the emotional demagogue bullshit about people who died for those rights. Get this: noone fought for your right to have the company's/school's/whatever IT department carry your packets.

And no, aggression, isn't a substitute for competence, btw. Just calling everyone who might disaggree a "fascist" preemptively, doesn't excuse you for not having a clue what you're talking about.

Geeze...

Re:

Schools have a responsibility to educate the students, and part of the responsibility is providing good learning materials

Since when does that include blocking access to materials the school doesn't like or deem "good learning materials?" If I'm reading

Re:Of Course They Should

A better example is a science teacher teaching evolution from a standard science book, and you decide you want to ignore the teacher's book and read your creationist book instead, and use that as the basis for your science papers.

And you would, quite rightly, get an 'F' for the paper, and possibly the class. Just as, anyone citing Wikipedia as a source in a paper should get nailed. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles (at least the non-volatile ones) tend to have references to good academic sources. for example, if we look up Fascism on Wikipedia (since it seems a popular word of the thread) we get the following sources (shortened, a lot, for brevity):

• Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (1992). London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-5254-X
• "Labor Charter" (1927-1934)
• Mussolini, Benito. Doctrine of Fascism which was published as part of the entry for fascismo in the Enciclopedia Italiana 1932.
• Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 1-4000-4094-9
• Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence.
• De Felice, Renzo Interpretations of Fascism, translated by Brenda Huff Everett, Cambridge; London : Harvard University Press, 1977 ISBN 0-674-45962-8.
• Eatwell, Roger. 1996. Fascism: A History. New York: Allen Lane.
• Hughes, H. Stuart. 1953. The United States and Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Now, not all of these may be usable as sources, but I'm willing to bet that a student doing a report on fascism could go look some of these books up and actually put together a good paper. The problem is that most students are not willing to put the effort into some bullshit paper that has no real meaning in their life, and will just use Wikipedia as the source, and copy references. Of course, this is also done with the bibliographies of books, so it's really a "six of one..." situation. If nothing else, Wikipedia is a good jumping off point. Blocking it, and claiming that it has no educational value, is just silly.

Of Course Not

Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across - after all, everything they're exposed to has already been vetted by an external body!

No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life.

Re:Of Course Not

Nature debunked the whole damn clear a year or two ago. Wikipedia is no worse than old time stalwarts like Brittanica. What this does demonstrate is that school boards are often people who working demonstrations of what comes out of a failed educational system.

Wrap it in a frame.

Yep, blocking it is stupid. But you should be reminding the kids that anyone can post anything on the Internet.

So just wrap a frame around the Wikipedia pages with the words "Any doofus can put anything up on the Internet. Don't be dumber than the doofus."

Re:Of Course Not

If I had a choice between Wikipedia and those history textbooks they use in gradeschools, I'd use wikipedia. Oh, sure, it may not be completely accurate. But it also hasn't been filtered for "political correctness" by the school board. There are several "classic" omissions: The Aztecs violently conquered everyone in the region, and carried out mass human sacrifice. Helen Keller was a vocal anarchist. Henry Ford sent money to Hitler. That sort of thing.

Wikipedia has this too. It has a slight liberal bias, a strong nerd bias, and a bias towards the special interest groups who edit their own pages (read: BDSM, Wicca, etc.). But usually, there's more of a chance of it including crackpot stuff than leaving important stuff out.

And, of course, compared to the rest of the internet, wikipedia is pretty good. If you're blocking wikipedia, you might as well block everything. Most likely, they're blocking wikipedia but allowing Uncyclopedia, Wikichan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Conservapedia, etc, etc. Oh, the irony.

Also, believe it or not, not every homework assignment is a term paper. Wikipedia is a good reference on math, chemistry, and physics. Oh, I wouldn't cite it. But I would use it to look up the definition of a "ring", or the molecular weight of Tyrosine. Sure, maybe they got it wrong. But am I going to worry about it? No.

Re:Of Course Not

Oh, I wouldn't cite it.

That brings up another point in favour of Wikipedia: it cites sources. So even if the Wiki itself isn't a credible source, you can still use the credible sources it links to.

So even if schools don't allow Wikipedia as a source directly, banning it outright completely removes what is by most counts an excellent repository of information. So, to put it in a sensationalist way, the school is limiting the students' ability to learn.

Re:Of Course Not

This is an interesting post. I agree Wikipedia is a pretty accurate source for pure, non-filtered, information. What I don't necessarily agree with is your claims of bias - while I can see the bias toward topics that nerds are often interested in (what's with the huge amounts of articles on anime characters?), I don't see where the claim of liberal bias comes from. With regards to political topics, Wikipedia seems very unbiased, as it should, given its NPOV policy and large amounts of editors with different opinions which are moderated by each other. The result is, as it appears to me, plain facts, unprocessed by the giant propaganda machines. I think thus it's a good utility to moderate anyone's worldview, because the facts are most often less extreme than they are presented elsewhere. (Warning: I'm somewhat drunk right now, and I don't live in the US, which I perceive as being in general much more inclined toward the right in economic matters than the society in which I live.)

Just Wikipedia?

The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools.

Virtually the entirety of the web (and, for that matter, a lot of the non-fiction, dead-tree books you'll find in most school libraries) are not a "credible or reliable source of information for schools". OTOH, schools ought to be teaching students to evaluate sources that have the kind of systematic problems that frequently encountered sources like Wikipedia has, and how to use them (e.g., as a gateway or refresher) to get value, and when not to use them, and not to use them exclusively. They ought not be blocking access to information on the basis that it is not up to some gold standard of reliability.

Now, there may be other valid reasons for blocking access to Wikipedia, but the reliability and credibility one is, from my perspective, pretty stupid.

(If there is a problem with students too-frequently citing—or plagiarizing—Wikipedia, the solution to that ought to be appropriate, well-communicated grading standards when it comes to appropriate sources and appropriate use and citation of those sources.)

Re:

I would expect that Wikipedia articles are on average far more reliable than the average high school American history textbook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told _ Me [wikipedia.org]

Ridiculous

This is ridiculous, I can't count the times Wikipedia has given me a reliable, quick and advanced source of information. If anything they should link it from the homepage.

What is credible?

I would like to see the same board underline how cooperate owned news media, and human written reference material are that much more reliable that partially peer reviewed, but publicly refutable medium. I am in no way denying the obvious problems with Wikipedia.

An indefensible decision.

This is the worst kind of micromanaging by people who apparently don't understand research or teachers.

No matter how poor a source Wikipedia may be (and in a moment I'll address that), it should be the decision of the classroom teacher whether and how to accept it as a legitimate source, just as the classroom teacher is the arbiter of whether a citation from Weekly World News counts for as much as one from the New York Times. It is the classroom teacher who should be the one explaining the difference to the students.

Second, we all know that Wikipedia is often an excellent first source of basic information on a topic. Me, I've got a Ph.D. and a book published with a university press, and I constantly refer to Wikipedia to ground myself in things. Which is not to say I'd cite it as an authority. Again, it's the classroom teacher whose responsibility it is to explain the difference.

I expect this is the first of about 1000 comments that will make essentially the same points. I hope that some sense of this can be conveyed to the school board in question.

Wikipedia is an excellent source for information

The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools.

I swear, Funk and Wagnall's, Britannica, and World Book must be stepping up with the lobby money. This isn't the first time I've read about the "inaccuracy" of Wikipedia recently.

Regardless of whether the information is accurate or not, Wikipedia is an excellent source because many times it has references listed a student can use as a basis for his/her own research. Teachers should not allow any type of encyclopedia to be used as a source, since, its supposed to be generalized knowledge on a subject. In fact, a great feature of Wikipedia is that editors have the ability to post a warning on an article stating that it needs to be cleaned up or that references need to be found to support the article.

Banning Wikipedia doesn't accomplish much. Encyclopedias, even in their paper form, have never been the most accurate sources for information. Compare a World Book article to a Britannica article on the same subject, and there will be notable differences. It all depends on the author, and the sources used to write the article.

I've found entries in Wikipedia on topics I have not found anywhere else, and many times followed an external link to a site that has more information on the topic. It would be a shame to take that ability away from students.

Re:Wikipedia is an excellent source for informatio

I swear, Funk and Wagnall's, Britannica, and World Book must be stepping up with the lobby money...

Yep, because things like World Book are _bastions_ of good information* [rr.com].

*(Yes, this is an excerpt from the actual World Book Encyclopedia(TM) that I grew up

no critical thinking leads to more of the same

Wikipedia is probably not that different in accuracy from the textbooks most schools in the U.S. are using. Here's the deal: teachers need to teach critical thinking more than rote memorization of facts. If they're not teaching kids to question the textbooks (and the teachers themselves!), then they're already guilty of what they're afraid of using wikipedia would do.

Wikipedia is *great*, as is the web and internet in general, for nothing more than bringing up aspects of a topic that someone wouldn't suspect even existed. Check out a topic on wikipedia and notice aspects of a topic that wouldn't occur to you - then research those aspects using whatever sources you want.

The advantages of Wikipedia far outweigh any data inaccuracies - that it's constantly updated, and has a far wider range of viewpoints being represented than any textbooks.

If you teach critical thinking to the kids, then you downplay wikipedia's weaknesses while leaving the strengths.

IMO, though, so think about it for yourself. :)

hmm

because googling will offer much better accuracy-

just read the cites on wikipedia and find the books yourself, dont cite wikipedia.

Absolutely.

Schools should absolutely block Wikipedia and sites like Wikipedia.

In fact, schools should do one better. They should start by blocking ALL WEB SITES. Next, they should whitelist and allow only sites on which ALL the information has been verified as 100% accurate by the school staff.

This information checking should be done independently by every school throughout the nation. To avoid bias by the teachers for their favourite subjects, the fact checking should only be done by IT staff.

Further, the results of fact checking shall be collected in a centralized, proprietary database, contracted to the highest bidder. Sites shall only be added to the whitelist once they have been unanimously approved by ALL the schools.

To avoid changes to the verified content, a parallel "intranet" system shall be created with static copies of the verified pages, and only these shall be accessible by students.

Damn, I should be a school board policymaker!

Check the citations.

The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools.

Just check the citations on the Wiki entry to see if they're from a credible source?

Seriously, it's not like they didn't give you a easy way to verify if something is credible.

or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?

What investigation? The citations are right on the page.

If they aren't there, one is better off looking at other sources for information.

Perhaps the schools should buy some accounts for the entire school to access sites like Britannica? -- I get the feeling they're too cheap to-do so.

Misinformation?

If you're going to start keeping students away from sources of misinformation you're probably going to have to fire a lot of teachers.

I can see the point

even though this is the wrong way to teach information literacy.

Part of me wants to say that if you block the Wikipedia, you really should have a simple white list. These are the sites you are allowed to visit, because we've checked them out and they are reliable.

But the thing is, the Wikipedia really is extraordinarily useful. And therefore very, very easy to misuse. Overall the Wikipedia is remarkably reliable. In a some cases its pretty mediocre, and obviously in a few cases it can go horribly, terribly wrong.

Overall, its a tremendous benefit to have Wikipedia. But you have to bring a skeptical attitude or you can get burned. The truth is you really ought to bring a skeptical viewpoint to the Wikipedia, but many schools aren't in the business of teaching skepticism. Knowing how to handle a site like Wikipedia is part of media literacy. You should use same skills you would use to evaluate a network news show, or a book, your American History textbook, or even an "official" encylopedia.

So, what this really amounts to is admission that the school is not prepared to teach its students critical reading. They really ought to teach that, but if they can't, then students might in some cases be lead wildly astray by Wikipedia. Perhaps for this sort of school, a white list would be better, or maybe even just giving up on net access altogether.

In Soviet Russia. . .

schools block wikipedia's access to students.

Students shouldn't just use one source!

They should not block Wikipedia, for sure, but if the child gets something wrong from their research, they should be marked down since they didn't do their research properly. Even Encyclopedia Britannica can be wrong- if they find a discrepancy between two sources, they should be required to investigate additional sources until they at least gather a consensus, and properly attribute it. Making a single observation and declaring it the absolute truth is faulty science, no reason that online research should be any different.

No, but...

If a student turns in a research paper citing Wikipedia they should get an F-.

You can't block it anyway

Our school district "blocks" sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. This provides our student body with an excellent education in some branches of computer science - like tunnelling, overseas proxy servers, and anonymous browsing in general.

Besides, to state the obvious, students generally do their homework papers at home - where Wikipedia is freely available.

I have a better idea...

Teachers and other academics often see themselves as the gatekeepers to knowledge; it should come as no surprise to anyone that when a new technology comes along which threatens this gatekeeper role, schools and educators start talking about banning the technology. Wikipedia is a disruptive technology when it comes to education, and the arguments against it amount to little more than smoke-screens and academic arm-waving. When you think about it, the arguments against Wikipedia always boil down to a lack of academic credentials for the people who create and edit Wikipedia articles, plus a propensity for young students to cut & paste Wikipedia articles into their own papers instead of doing real research. The first argument, lack of credentials, is the easiest to dismiss.

Through Wikipedia, unlike what you see in a typical school textbook, readers can always find out exactly who edited which articles, and in many cases, they can follow the discussion on the talk pages about why people think some information should be included in an article or, conversely, why some information should be excluded. Overall, those two features represent a massive boost to both the credibility and reliability of the factual knowledge contained in the Wikipedia. Edit pages and talk pages open the door for everyone to see how the knowledge in the Wikipedia is created and distilled. If Wikipedia editors held academic credentials, it might make it easier for us to accept that the facts contained in the articles are true, but credentials themselves don't have any direct bearing on the truth or falsehood of any given fact. Wikipedia, just like any other potential source of factual knowledge, should always be taken with a grain of salt. Academics can make mistakes just like anyone else and, on occasion, they've been known to distort or misrepresent facts based on a personal or a political agenda. Facts become facts when we have wide-spread agreement on the truth of certain statements. Wikipedia fosters this process of building consensus and agreement -- traditional textbooks sure as hell do not.

The second argument educators like to make against Wikipedia is that students find it easy to plagerize using Wikipedia, or that many students simply rip facts out of Wikipedia articles without doing any real research to check the validity of those facts. To this argument I'd just like to point out that the same kind of student laziness existed well before Wikipedia came on the scene, and Wikipedia is not to blame because some students prefer to game the system instead of learning what the schools are trying to teach. Hell -- I think a way to solve this problem would be to have students write original Wikipedia articles instead of useless, overly redundant term papers. At least then, student's work would actually amount to something useful, and their efforts might contribute to the overall scope of knowledge. As it is now, term papers are pretty much make-work, which may be one of the reasons why some students don't want to put forth do more than a minimum amount of effort in writing them. If students had to create original Wikipedia articles, I would image that they'd be forced to go and do some real fact-gathering and writing, which is exactly what the schools are trying to teach with term papers, right?

Harry Potter and the Censorious Schoolmarms

J. K. Rowling had some good commentary on the idea of school administrators trying to censor what information sources the students are allowed to read, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the highly dislikeable Dolores Umbridge, put in charge of Hogwarts by the incompetent and fearful government of the wizarding world, issued a series of edicts including a ban on students reading a tabloid newspaper that had just published a lengthy article about student Harry Potter, who was on Umbridge's bad side at the time. Naturally, once it was banned it became the most popular reading matter all over the school.