Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia? 545
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
You, sir, are a genius.
You are one of the few that "gets it".
Re:I wish I had mod points (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Of Course They Should (Score:5, Interesting)
How about, "the faster we hit rock bottom, the sooner the mobs with pitchforks will rise up?"
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Interestingly we are also well on our way to becoming like our other 'enemies', currently the suicide bombing Muslim religious theocracies. Its questionable whether our religious right will be taking away the right to education and implementing other oppressions
Re:Of Course They Should (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of Course They Should (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of Course They Should - NOT (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'd go further than that: yes, wikipedia is unreliable, of course it is. But it is a known quantity. If you block it, where will the students who used wikipedia for everything get there answers? Maybe from cheat sites, or from uncyclopedia, or from random blogs!
If the teacher finds the wikipedia entries related
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Wait a second... you're saying that a high school student doesn't have the cognitive skills to process Wikipedia?
Source of All Knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
Re:Of Course They Should - NOT (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Thank you for the reply.
I'm glad to hear that, and your rationale does make unfortunate sense. I'm sorry you say you hate working for a public agency; I'm sure it's for good reason. For despite my extreme skepticism about public educa
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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.
In your hurry to get those panties all bunched up, you overlooked the fact that "students, parents, other citizens, and democracy at large" is essentially equal to "taxpayers" in the sense he used it. He's saying that he, as a public employee, owes his employers (the public at large) the most efficient and effective use of the limited resources we as a society have collectively granted them. He didn't say "we must follow the whims and fancies of everyone who pays taxes", which appears to be the bizarre con
Language matters (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they're not the same. Partly for technical reasons (students don't pay taxes, for example, immigrants do but aren't citizens, and so forth), but more importantly because these are different roles people fill, and because language matters. Casting the debate in terms of "taxpayers" introduces an immediate bias, just as casting it in terms of "education" introduces a different (and
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The language we use when talking about these things very much matters. If we frame schooling in terms of taxpayers, then educatio
Re:Manganese (Score:5, Funny)
Solomon
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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.
Um, I'm not in favor of this policy, but your post is just silly. Schools have a responsibility to educate the students, and part of the responsibility is providing good learning materials. The Internet is a cesspool of bad learning materials (not necessarily Wikipedia), so of course the school is concerned about what the students are exposed to while AT SCHOOL. I don't
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Since when does that include blocking access to materials the school doesn't like or deem "good learning materials?" If I'm reading fiction in class should it be taken from me because it's full of nonsense?
Re:Of Course They Should (Score:4, Insightful)
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.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem is, these aren't just 5 year old. For elementary I can understand everything being whitelist only simply because there is too much stuff you can accidently run into.
For High School students, they are nearly adult, and such need to start learning NOW about concequences. If they were to make a strict rule that says, "Don't visit Wikipedia or you will be punished" There would be a lot of arguing. (as opp
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They're too involved in their IPods and X-Boxes to care. Don't sit back for too long. You may be waiting around for nothing.
You're missing WHY the students are giving up that (Score:3, Insightful)
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How is reading a form of speech?
Oh bloody please (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Which is a different thing (Score:3)
Which is still a different thing from what I'm saying there. Yes, kids still ha
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About every book on the Fiction shelf in the local library contains content that is just unreliable as your average Wikipedia article
Why go that far? I'm pretty sure I found at least one mistake in every science text book I used at school. Most were picked up by the publisher and sent to the teacher as errata, some were also spotted by the teacher.
Some were caused by bad fact checking, and some were caused by scientific consensus moving on (subsequent experiments disproving earlier theories). Wikipedia is prone to the first error at least as much as print resources, but is far less prone to the second, since it can be updated much
Of Course Not (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Exactly, as a current college student I have realized that Wikipedia, although an excellent starting point, is not necessarily an unreliable source but not a credible source. As for turning a paper in with a cited source being Wikipedia, you will not be punished but the professor will note that you should use a better source for information. Personally, if you just scroll to the bottom of a Wikipedia page you can find all the sources of information, and those are where students should be focusing on.
Re:Of Course Not (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrap it in a frame. (Score:3, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Textbooks Too (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they were just sick of writing F on papers handed in which were c
Wikiphobia (Score:3, Interesting)
Hear, hear!
For example, schools are themselves an unreliable source of information, as is shown ipso facto by having them declare in a blanket way that Wikipedia is unreliable as a source of information.
But schools are what we have, so we deal with them. I don't suggest shutting them down just because they've given bad facts once in a while. No system
Just Wikipedia? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
It's about quality (Score:2)
Primary sources are preferred (Score:2)
People are generally up in arms over banned books because they limit exposure of the students to someone else's idea of 'dangerous id
Re:Primary sources are preferred (Score:4, Insightful)
Blocking access to one source of information and not to others is setting a particularly poor example on how to evaluate the source of information. Many Wikipedia articles are very well-written and contain citations that back up the research. I'd like to see some of the news stations do the same.
Usually there's some sort of challenge policy available for books in a school library. I don't see how reviewing a ban on Wikipedia would be any different. If I were a parent in that school district, I'd be over there asking about challenging that decision under the same policy.
What is credible? (Score:5, Interesting)
An indefensible decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 with... absolutely no propaganda there... nope, not none.)
A better alternative to blocking (Score:2, Insightful)
I have seen a few pages on Wikipedia that contain downright inaccuracy. I've edited them myself, only to see my changes promptly reverted out by a few misinformed zealots who keep the pages on their watchlists.
The pr
Books aren't reliable either (Score:2)
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no critical thinking leads to more of the same (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
just read the cites on wikipedia and find the books yourself, dont cite wikipedia.
only if they also block FOX CNN and MSNBC (Score:2)
Seriously, is wikipedia any more correct or incorrect than any other source of information.
Absolutely. (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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I think it's very important that students in schools are only allowed to access 100% accurate information. That way, when they get out into the real world, they will trust everything they read and can be manipulated easily.
Holy Crap (Score:2)
FIRST of all, they might as well block the entire Internet. I can put up a web page claiming to be by Smarty McPants, Ph.D, that says smoking is good for you. I can even Googlebomb it up so (for a while, anyways) any relevant search shows my page in a top spot. Just because something is on the Internet does not make it credible! Are they going to block Google too?
Heck, I could print out a booklet on my bubblejet that looks authoritative,
schools should block NOTHING (Score:2)
educational supervision and guidance should handle the issue, assuming you are getting teachers who are worth hiring.
part of life's journey is running across the odd "mein kampf" or Imus webcast. just like seeing the dirty old man flashing under the railroad bridge on the way to Billy's birthday party, seeing 20 contenders on the local TV news for your presidential primary, and watching the second world trade tower fall live on TV.
shit happens. you need to learn what it is, and how to cope.
What About At-Home Use? (Score:2)
The most important lesson, trust no-one (Score:2)
Especially those that agree with you. The reason is very simple, if you accept as fact something because it is what you like to hear, you are far more likely to accept lies.
If you are a X-winger and read a X-wing newspaper a lie told by that newspaper has a far greater chance of being accepted. Same goes in reverse, if someone says something that you do NOT agree with, you owe it to yourselve to have a healthy distrust, of YOURSELVE!
Always be willing to accept that what you think is true is wrong, and tha
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Misinformation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, sometimes you'll run across somebody who's really amazingly good at teaching a skill - but only a mediocre practitioner of it. And vice versa: you can be a staggeringly good artist, say, and still be lousy at teaching the skills you've mastered. The saying doesn't fi
Schools should start their own wikipedia (Score:2)
Step 1: accounts and passwords are created, additional account creation is blocked
Step 2: demonstrate all edits are traceable to an account
Step 3: you are responsible for your account security and all edits done by your account
Step 4: release
Step 5: edit and disipline
That will teach a lot.
Must be from Pennsylvania (Score:2, Interesting)
I can see the point (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Like blocking Google in 2003 (Score:2)
As more evidence that Wikipedia is the new Google, thes
In Soviet Russia. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Students shouldn't just use one source! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Good thing Wikipedia has never forked! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the other way around. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Most of the vandalism I have to revert comes from US elementary schools. It seems like people below a certain age simply don't have the maturity to handle the power to edit content, without vandalising it in some way. Children old enough to be able to contributed can go ahead and create accounts to edit.
Bugger off (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
But thanks for asking, asking even the most stupid question is a beginning: no you should not block Wikipedia. No you should not encourage using it. No you should, in general, not give the impression that everything can be solved by a simple rule.
You should do what teachers are supposed to do: give students the means and ability, the knowledge and the judgment to decide by and for themselves on a case to case basis when it might be a good idea and when not -- and why.
Maybe work that into your biology and politics classes. Demonstrate. Discuss.
In a word: use your brain, for a change.
on balance (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm quite bemused by this (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're not blocking the rest of the internet that can contain anything, from anybody and is subject to no review at all?
Maybe in the board's concern they should extend their block to any site that's ever reported incorrect or disputed information - this would cover pretty much every site in existence - religion, politics, history blah blah.
Whilst Wikipedia shouldn't be taken as gospel (well actually they gospels shouldn't be taken as gospel either, but I digress), if you dip beneath the front page and examine the edits it actually allows you to see most sides of the debate on most topics.
Of course ;-) (Score:3, Funny)
The should block Wikipedia from both student and teachers.
They should not cave in to pressure from teachers or parents, they should stick to their guns.
Because the students need first get used to being screwed by then man. And second and more importantly, they need to learn to subvert the system while they're young; it will help them in the real world.
The Most Important Thing I Learned In History... (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't follow it through to university level but I still value one specific history class I took as the most important part of my education.
Studying World War II history, we weren't taught to memorize the dates of the outbreak of war, the dates of the conferences between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and a bunch of other statistical but semi meaningless information when taken out of context.
Instead we were taught to look at the different sources, to embrace the fact that German propaganda ministry materials were biased, look at the just as biased British accounts of the time, the histories written (as Churchill said) by the victor after the event, form our own conclusions about where the truth likely lay and still appreciate the value that the slanted perspective would have had on the respective populations.
By understanding the broader picture, not only did I find a hell of a lot more interest in the period but I also got taught how to think independently, to analyze sources and form my own opinions.
Wikipedia isn't a perfect source of truth. Then again, most textbooks that cover their nation's wars with another country aren't either.
In an ideal world, you teach students how to assess the truth of what they're told, how to think and how to form their own opinions.
Unfortunately, America seems hell bent on raising children that believe the sanctioned news source is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When they grow up and start watching something like Fox News as their source of truth, look at the wonderful mess a country that had no idea about the real facts can get in to when the majority of voters think what they're told to and need four years of death and a demolished "liberated" country to make them stop and question.
Now imagine what would have happened if the average American had learned in highschool to listen to what Fox was saying, flick over to the Daily Show for a humorous counter, go on line to a non American news source like the BBC for a third perspective, then Wikipedia for a potentially somewhat inaccurate but still useful grounding in the region's politics and history.
Sure, they might reasonably have concluded Iraq had chemical weapons - after all, we still had the recepits from when we sold them to them in the 80s. They might have weighed up the national interest and judged it higher than the concerns voiced elsewhere in the world. I don't care whether they would have agreed with me or not - but at least they would have thought rather than spat venom at anyone being "unpatriotic," leaving all rational thought at the door.
So, in short: A source doesn't have to be accurate to be valuable. Often, in learning to appreciate the inaccuracies, we learn vastly more. If nothing else, at least we engage our brains - which seems like a good thing to encourage school children to do if you're going to call yourselves educators.
You can't block it anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, to state the obvious, students generally do their homework papers at home - where Wikipedia is freely available.
I have a better idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm, not credible... (Score:4, Insightful)
Approved vs. Authoritative (Score:5, Informative)
Let's educate kids to use it intelligently. (Score:4, Insightful)
So let's train our children to live in a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available from a single site on the web - but you can't 100% trust what it says. Merely blocking access to it does nothing - worse than nothing in fact because just as soon as they get out into the real world where Wikipedia ISN'T blocked - they'll use it uncritically because they've never been taught to use it right.
For things that don't matter much - just use it - and 99 times out of 100 it's right. For things that DO matter - by all means read Wikipedia - but use it to find the primary references that you CAN trust. Then look those up and reference them. But that's what you've got to do with any encyclopedia - there are just as many (arguably more) errors in Encyclopedia Britannica - and I don't think that's been banned yet.
This is no different from the technological challenges of earlier generations. When I was a kid in the early '70s, the pocket calculator was just starting to take over from the slide rule. The school found that the lack of the need to figure out where to put the decimal point (which a calculator does automatically - but the slide rule does not), we were not estimating the value of the result in our heads - so if we made a keying mistake on the calculator, we could easily be miles from the correct answer and not know it. Nowadays, all kids use calculators and slide rules are pretty much museum pieces - we got over this 'problem' with calculators and taught people to realise the possibility of a keying error.
The same needs to happen for the ENTIRE Internet - not just Wikipedia. It's ludicrous to block Wikipedia - and not block any of a gazillion other information-providing sites. Most of those are created by a single individual who could just as easily be wrong as Wikipedia. We need to train kids to recognise what web-based information can be trusted and what must be double-checked before we can trust it.
More B.S. from the public school system (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone still thinks that public "education" is about education, they're horribly mistaken. Calculus (and nearly all mathematics) hasn't changed in 100's of years, yet schools demand new math books each year. Why is that? History, as far as I know, doesn't (and shouldn't) change... yet new books are printed each year and sold for ridiculous prices. Many contain less actual content than the previous generations before them.
Public schooling is a business and the reasons to block Wikipedia are fiscal. Publishers and curriculum planners are directly threatened by Wikipedia.
Everyone knows our schooling is broken, and everyone has the wrong idea of how to fix it. More money is not the answer (some would argue that it's the problem) nor are laptops. The system needs to be rebuilt or abolished altogether, as do most long-lived government institutions (like social security, welfare, and minimum wage).
Let's Ban Teachers Too (Score:3, Insightful)
Education? (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't the POINT of a 'liberal' (in the academic arts sense, not the political sense) education to teach the students to reason, to be able to measure the value of the information they are getting, to filter it as necessary to draw useful conclusions?
Seems to me that Wikipedia is EXACTLY the perfect tool to teach about how information is presented and how one should read with care toward the author's biases and intent. LIKE EVERY OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION (such as encyclopedias and books), Wiki authors are generally altruistic in intent but everyone has inherent biases. Further, some are not so altruistic. With books and reference works, the recycle time is long and slow between editions. With wiki it's very fast, sometimes hours. So in a sense Wiki is the 'hothouse' version of every other reference work.
I think it's an excellent educational tool, both as a reference (cited original sources and generally good summaries of knowledge-to-date) and as a meta-example of the potential dangers of simply absorbing facts without thinking critically about their source.
Wikipedia works! (Score:3, Informative)
Three issues:
In fact, come to think of it, every time I've cited Wikipedia in a paper, I've gotten an A on it. Better, for some of those papers I've received "course citations" -- special notes of positive recognition which are recorded on my transcript. One other professor made a point of stopping me and saying, "This is really a very good paper. Could you make an extra copy of it for me?" I call that success, n'est-ce pas?
I don't just cite Wikipedia, of course. I cite academic papers too. But those papers often don't spell out the basics -- so as an undergrad trying to apply more advanced math, I need some background, and Wikipedia provides that. (Textbooks would too, but it's quicker to go to the Wikipedia article -- and the Wikipedia article is often just as useful if not more). So in the spirit of full disclosure (and the Academic Honor Code), I cite all my sources. That means that, if I need to figure out how the Quaternions work and Wikipedia tells me, I cite Wikipedia.
Admittedly, I'm not researching history or some politically-loaded subject. I'm researching something which benefits from Wikipedia's huge nerd bias. Wikipedia is much more than an encyclopedia: Will I find a complete description of the quaternions in the Encyclopedia Brittanica? What about particle filters? How about the naive Bayes classifier or the ensemble Kalman filter? Wikipedia has those articles! If I go to the article titled State space (controls), Wikipedia goes so far as to show the nonlinear state-space model for a pendulum. I am sure Brittanica doesn't give that.
Librarians keep insisting that people use the Internet as we used Old Media. But it just doesn't work the same. What if some guy on the gamedev.net forum helps me out by sharing an idea with me; should I not cite him? I make a point of including proper footnotes, even for sources like that. Then, it's up to me to make that source authoritative -- by doing a correctness proof in the paper, for example. It takes a little legwork -- but if you immediately write off sources of information like that, you ignore most of the power of the Internet that Old Media lacked. Random, unpublished people know a lot of stuff. You need to verify it often, but it's still useful (and "verification" doesn't necessarily mean "appealing to authority"). As many posters have said, it sometimes just takes critical thinking.
The REAL Scoop on this... (Score:3, Informative)
After sniffing around a little and making some inquiries of people who are in a higher position within the county, I think I've finally found out the "true" reason for this. I was told that, since our school board has paid a hefty access rights cost to World Book Online, it was decided to remove access to Wikipedia. It seems that some higher-ups were upset that they've shelled out the money for students to use an online encyclopedia, and that practically no one was using it! So, rather than investigate why people wanted to use Wikipedia so much more than World Book Online, they decide to remedy the situation by taking away Wikipedia.
Frankly, I believe that entirely. When I emailed the IT rep at the county level, and gave her a list of about 10 or so legitimate mathematical processes (such as the Rational Root Theorem, Synthetic Division, Euler's Method, etc), none of which is available on World Book but which is easily readable on Wikipedia, I got a staid and trite reply that basically repeated the "not credible like an encyclopedia" mantra and didn't address my particular points.
Oh well, we've managed since two months ago when I submitted this story. Some of us, being more knowledgable about computers and the internet than the usual lemming teachers around us, have found creative methods of still retrieving the information from Wikipedia we need to be effective teachers. (For example, I saw a handy way of processing a cubic spline based upon a Wikipedia article, which I proved by hand myself during my lunch break to make sure it worked, and then taught it to my students.)
I wonder if World Book has an article on proxies....
Londovir
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Traditional methods of publishing lag by significant time. Want to research the Darfur Crisis, Try to find out about it in the books in your library, oh, wait, none there, I