| Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. It is in the top 10 of most visited websites on the Internet and a topic of hot dispute as to its value as a reliable source of information. Wikipedia |
| Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, sums up his vision of what he believes this huge project is capable of achieving: |
| Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Slashdot 2004 |
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| How Wikipedia is created |
| Wikipedia is set up so that any visitor to the website can add or edit content. This gives it distributed authority, rather than the centralised authority of Encyclopaedia Britannica and other major encyclopedias. A recent analysis of the reliability of the articles has shown that there is a correlation between the number of edits and the article quality. |
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| Reliability of Wikipedia |
Since its inception in 2001, there has been an ongoing discussion about the reliability of an encyclopedia that can be edited by any user.
There is no easy answer to this. Some see the collaborative nature of the articles as a strength that helps reliability, while others cite collaboration as the main weakness.
Research that shows high reliability of some articles must be set against high-profile scandals about deliberate misinformation and vandalism of other articles. |
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| Educational use of Wikipedia |
| As with all encyclopedias, Wikipedia is good at providing: |
- a starting point for research
- background knowledge
- sources for further reading
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| Due to the way it is created, Wikipedia is often the best source of: |
- breaking news of world events
- technological advances
- popular culture
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Students should always be encouraged to consult more that one source, including encyclopedias. Mandating that they cite sources will soon show if students are reading from a range of primary and secondary sources.
Banning Wikipedia is unlikely to be productive and teachers and teacher librarians could consider editing Wikipedia themselves to direct and improve their student's access to Web resources. |
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| Editing Wikipedia |
| Educators can take responsibility for editing Wikipedia to improve its content, and a class exercise for students can also be valuable. |
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