Education’s ‘dirty secret’: Wikipedia in the classroom


Wikipedia is still not referred to as a reliable source for use in the classroom by many college and university professors – even as professionals in other fields, like medicine, are learning to trust the online encyclopedia.

wikipedia
Wikipedia has about the same number of errors as Encyclopedia Britannica, according to research.

An estimated 70 percent of physicians admit to using Wikipedia for clinical decisions, according to the International Journal of Medical Informatics. Some estimates place that figure even higher, at 90 percent.

But in a recent webcast sponsored by plagiarism-prevention service Turnitin, an informal poll of the participants revealed that half of those instructors say they do not allow students to cite or even use Wikipedia in their courses.

Jake Orlowitz, a Wikimedia Foundation grantee and Wikipedia administrator, said he thinks more educators use the site than they often admit, due to an academic stigma the site has carried for more than a decade.

“What I’ve seen increasingly with professors, it’s not that they found so many errors in the articles, but that there is a certain amount of shame and denial that comes with using the site,” Orlowitz said. “It’s almost like a dirty secret. The hardest people to convince have been educators. And with great reason.”

While the main “pillars” of Wikipedia originally focused on neutrality, in recent years the site has focused more on accuracy.

Now the free encyclopedia, which can famously be edited by anybody in the world, encourages college instructors to use the site not only as a resource but as a course assignment.

The existing flaws, errors, and controversial nature of the site could even serve as lessons of their own, Orlowitz said.

“I want to make the case that regardless of what you think of Wikipedia as an academic recourse, there’s great pedagogical benefit to including it in your classroom,” he said.

Some professors are already asking students to write Wikipedia articles as homework. Other courses require students to take an entire semester to craft a single, deeply researched article.

Wikipedia also operates an education program that provides resources and opportunities for students writing entries for the site. The program began in 2010 with a focus on public policy initiatives.

It resulted in the creation of 6,000 Wikipedia articles equal to 20,000 printed pages.

“A huge part of working on Wikipedia is gaining awareness of what neutrality means, what credible sources are, what biased content looks like,” Orlowitz said. “And it’s exciting, or cool, for students. We often tell students that if they write an article, they could very well write the most-read article on the subject in the world.”

The website receives 8,000 views per second, and is widely considered the most popular nonprofit website on the planet.

Orolowitz did caution instructors and students to remain skeptical of what they read on the site, despite Wikipedia’s commitment to accuracy.

A 2005 study by the journal Nature found that Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica had roughly the same number of errors; another study comparing the site to a peer-reviewed oncology database reached a similar conclusion.

A strict requirement to sourcing any article edits, as well as a complicated system of peer review and automated review bots, keep many of the articles free of errors, but the nature of the site does let some slip through onto any of its 30 million articles.

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, most of Wikipedia’s editing takes place after publication. Like all encyclopedias, Orlowtiz said, Wikipedia should be a starting place for research, not a final destination.

“Verifiability is a very clear pillar of this site, but I have to put it in context here,” he said said. “‘Verifiability’ is different than ‘verified.’ We require that a fact is ‘look-up-able,’ but we don’t require that every sentence and phrase go through a process of verification before being published.”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake.

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