History and Education: Past and Present

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Wikipedia: Evidence of a generational chasm?

About a week ago, the folks over at Inside Higher Ed ran a story about Middlebury College’s new stance on Wikipedia. To Wit:

“As educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation,” said Don Wyatt, chair of the department. “Even though Wikipedia may have some value, particularly from the value of leading students to citable sources, it is not itself an appropriate source for citation,” he said.

The department made what Wyatt termed a consensus decision on the issue after discussing problems professors were seeing as students cited incorrect information from Wikipedia in papers and on tests. In one instance, Wyatt said, a professor noticed several students offering the same incorrect information, from Wikipedia.”

I could not be more opposed to a decision like this. Or, more accurately, I believe the professors have chosen the wrong reasons to make what is at the end of the day a defensible decision.

First off, some background. I’ve thought for some time that scholarly fear of the internet and electronic sources bordered on hysteria. Professors unskilled in web use feared that they were now vulnerable to an onslaught of plagiarized material turned in by students. The result has been a new prominence for the issue of plagiarized information, and a negative caricature for what the latter-day prohibitionists might call “demon internet.” (I'm sure that this generational chasm is a topic to which I will return--what I'm slowly starting to see as the greatest challenge our field has faced since the "cultural turn" began)

Now, let’s get a few things out of the way immediately:

1) Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for a college paper. (or, perhaps for any paper above, say, 6th or 7th grade. Certainly, the last time I used an encyclopedia as a source for academic work was a paper I wrote on UFOs in the 6th grade).
2) It is perfectly acceptable as a starting point, and for background information. Even the Wiki folks believe that their creation is best used in conjunction with other sources, not as a stand alone resource for research-based tasks. So no one, aside from some 18-year olds trying to finish an assignment think that this is acceptable.
3) The problem with wikipedia is not that it is internet-based, and is not with its structure (Roy Rosenzweig put this to rest: Wikipedia, while perhaps uneven in its coverage, is on balance as accurate as a traditional encyclopedia).
4) Any “solution” to the wikipedia “problem” that demonizes its media (internet) or its structure (open source/wisdom of the crowds model) is missing the point, and is also incredibly short-sighted.

Last summer saw a real flurry of articles on this topic, and that flurry moved me to put Wikipedia at the center of my US history survey course. Rather than banning it, I reasoned, I’d REQUIRE it, on the theory that the best way to keep your teenager from smoking is to sit him in the garage and make him smoke a whole pack (no, I might add, I don't have any kids yet). I had students read about how Wikipedia was constructed and compare one article to the same topic in other encyclopedias as well as peer-reviewed academic literature on the topic.

Students were surprisingly engaged with this topic. Many claimed not to know what Wikipedia was, but by the end of the course, they were skillfully debating how knowledge is produced and asking questions of epistemological import without any prompting from me. The class divided on their response—some thought they’d never consult Wikipedia again; some found that the Wiki article was the best of the bunch that they read. In no case, however, did any student believe that Wikipedia could be a stand-alone source, and even its greatest supporters wrote opinions to that effect in their own words—not because I told them to, but because they could see with their own eyes that the information had potential flaws AND because encyclopedias simply aren’t the right kinds of sources.

I put it to the pedagogical world to decide which approach is better—historians who engage, embrace, and work WITH changes in technology and knowledge production, or backward looking prohibitionists who still scamper in fear of the digital evolution that is taking place. Banning internet sources is foolish in an age when many colleges are shifting to on-line subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals (American Historical Review, Journal of American History, etc). Students do need to be taught skills—and the only way to teach these skills is to engage real situations in which students might find themselves. Wikipedia is real, and it exists. Students will be dealing with it in their personal and professional lives for the remainder of their short, nasty, and brutish existences, so it is our responsibility to teach them how to do so most effectively. We abandon that responsibility if we engage in “bans” or prohibitions, relying on regulations to do what we should be doing in our teaching and our couse constructions. Rather than bemoaning poor student search habits, we should help them learn how to distinguish between "hits" that all look the same on the search results page.

Does Wikipedia belong in college papers? Absolutely not. But should we single it out? Again, absolutely not. As I understand college, Wikipedia has been banned since even before it existed—it is a reference work, and not one pedagogue/historian would accept a paper based on Britannica in 1990, just as not one should accept one based on Wikipedia today. Our societal encounter with new forms of knowledge production is an opportunity to engage students in terms they understand about the philosophical underpinnings of historical interpretation. How often do we have an opportunity to do that?

If History records anything, it's that regulatory prohibition that is not based on a societal consensus never works. Prohibition of Wikipedia only marginalizes the prohibitors, and (to my mind) widens the gap between the public at large, and the academics who are their instructors. This gap is too wide already.

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