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?"

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[account_deleted]

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Block Google

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find even more disinformation via google. And consider, I just now pulled up a random phrase out of the blue -- "darfur history" -- and gave it to google. The wikipedia article is #1.

And, oh my gosh, if you click on google's "Cached" link you get a copy of the wiki article, bypassing any attempts at blocking the terrifying wikipedia monster. Complete with the disclaimer "This article documents a current event; Information may change rapidly as the event progresses" which warns people to think twice before believing it, unlike what other media outlets do. Teaching kids to question what they read???

Furthermore, if I enter "why school boards are stupid" I get 1,770,000 links that explain why.

Forget wikipedia. Google must be stopped.

No, but...

[rob1980]

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

Re:Of Course They Should

[TheRaven64]

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 more easily. Some of the textbooks I used in the '80s were old even then. I recall approximations of the age of the universe differing by two orders of magnitude between a school-issued book and an astronomy book I bought that had been published more recently (and included a little historical segment on previous estimates, and how they were arrived at).

There are two things wrong with this decision. The first is that, by censoring Wikipedia as unreliable, they are implying that all other, uncensored, resources are reliable. This is almost certainly not the case. The other problem is that isolating children from inaccurate and unreliable sources prevents them from developing a vital critical faculty. I see no problem with children being exposed to sources containing errors, since it teaches them to rely on multiple sources, and check where and how those sources acquired their data if they disagree.

Re:Oh bloody please

[ChaosDiscord]

The first amendment protections have been extended to every level of government, including state level. Furthermore, courts have clearly ruled that students in school still have civil rights, including protections from unreasonable search and seizure and protection of free speech. This is unsurprising, since, generally speaking, children are legally required to attend school and those schools are funded and run by the government.

Secure connection

[Gracenotes]

Actually, there is a secure connection [wikimedia.org], which, depending on the type of block, can be used to access Wikipedia; also with a poor connection. And there are always open proxies, if only for reading Wikipedia, not editing it (open proxies are blocked for various reasons). Draco would be proud.

Approved vs. Authoritative

[BlazeMiskulin]

Reading through the comments here, I see lots of divisiveness, but little actual grasp of reality. 1) Reliability of wikipedia. My litmus test for an encyclopedia is the Tesla/Marconi test. Look at the entries for Marconi and Tesla. If it says that Marconi invented radio, then it's not a reliable source. If it says that Tesla did, it's reliable. This is a point of fact that was settled by the SCOTUS about 60 years ago. Wikipedia gets it right. Most printed encyclopedias I have checked get it wrong. (I used to work for a school district, and part of my duties were to receive in books. I had *lots* of chances to check encyclopedias). 2) 'Learning' is not about regurgitating accepted information. It's about gaining the skills to understand and discriminate good information from bad. Part of the way that a person gains these skills is by occasionally doing the wrong thing and getting corrected. A school district which lays out a policy which (in effect) says 'You may only cite sources of which we approve', is not allowing students the chance to make mistakes--and thereby learn. They are also eliminating the concept of contesting data. (see the following point) 3) Approved sources vs. authoritative sources. When I was in high school, I took a class on WWII. I read the approved textbooks and the approved stories of what happened. As part of the class, I interviewed a WWII veteran--in this case, my father. When comparing the approved text's description of what happened at Monte Casino, and my father's description of what happened, there was a huge disparity. One version was written by historians, peer reviewed, edited, and accepted by the school district. The other version was from someone who was actually there at the time it happened. Which would *you* believe? In school we are taught (by authoritative sources!) that George Washington's teeth were wooden (False-- they were ivory), that Marconi invented the radio (False--it was Nicola Tesla), and that American bravery resulted in the capture of Monte Casino (False--it was the devious and brutal actions of the Sikhs that causes a German surrender). I'm not sure about the last one, but I know that Wikipedia gets the first two correct, where the approved sources get them wrong. The administrations who ban Wikipedia (and other online resources) on the basis of 'validity', are prejudiced. They think that anything in print is, somehow, magically endowed with veracity. Those administrations are wrong. The truth of the matter is that *all* sources of information should be questioned. They should be bounced against other sources and both the similarities and discrepancies should be considered and weighed for value. But schools aren't interested in that. They aren't interested in teaching kids how to think, because teachers aren't rewarded on how well students criticize 'conventional wisdom', and critical and independent thinking doesn't show up well on standardized tests. And before anyone shouts me down, I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has been on the teaching side of academia--as both a teacher and an administrator--for the better part of 20 years. As a teacher, I welcomed *any* source that could be justified. I will set one instance of 'My dad was there' against a thousand established encyclopedias and history texts.f Wikipedia is full of experts, and they have to defend themselves--constantly--against a host of counter arguments. If that isn't the epitome of peer review, I don't know what is. Oh... and for those who say that sites such as MySpace have no value? Have you seen how many politicians are explaining their platforms via MySpace blogs and profiles? That sounds pretty authoritative to me.

Re:Of Course They Should - NOT

[Nosferatu Alucard]

At my school, it seems to be a general idea that Wikipedia cannot be used as a source of information due to it's possible inaccuracy. However, students including myself are smart enough to think for themselves and use the view the sources OF the wikipedia article and see what those have to offer us. We don't have to cite wiki, and we still get the same information. Eventually you could do this until you ended up at the original source anyway, just have to backtrack until you get a legitimate source.

Re:More B.S. from the public school system

[stewbacca]

Yikes. A tad cynical, but pretty accurate. To be fair to schools, most of the textbook purchases are based on a newer text that more closely aligns with the curriculum standards. Smart schools will run down their curriculum standards and course objectives and find the textbooks that best fit. Unfortunately, some schools actually listen to the salesmen, instead of figuring out which texts are good for their own schools.

I am wrapping up my grad thesis and I have even a more cynical view than this being fiscal. Instead, I propose that teachers see technology in general (and sites like Wikipedia) as a threat due to the fact they don't understand it. In the school I work at, our youngest teacher is 40 years old and was certified long before the Internet was mainstream. It is no wonder that NONE of our teachers have a clue when it comes to making decisions about using Wikipedia or not.

Wikipedia works!

[TerranFury]

Three issues:

1. When you tell students not to cite Wikipedia, you're telling them to omit a citation for one of their sources. This is bad.
2. I use Wikipedia all the time, and I cite it, with no ill affects -- at the university level. That's because I use it correctly. Surely, if it's good enough for my engineering department, it's good enough for 10th graders?
3. Wikipedia is an amazing reference for basic applied math and computer science, and you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

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...

[Londovir]

As the original poster, I can tell you the following.

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