Week 7: Wikipedia, Etc. As Trusted Sources?

As a classroom teacher, I fought the Wikipedia fight for years.

The biggest problem is not the comparative accuracy of Wikipedia as a resource.  If that is a valid measure, then when I play Powerball and get 1 correct number as compared to an Easy Pick where I have no correct numbers, does this mean I have done particularly well on my own playing the lottery?  I hope not because whatever the prevailing opinion, I am still out $2 if I bought 2 lines and won nothing.

Teaching students to discriminate among various pieces of information is incredibly difficult as the teenage brain is oftentimes focused on finding the path of least resistance.  They have the same 24 hours per day that everyone else has, but the sheer volume of what they try to pack into the average day means something has to give.  For example, a class of my world history students, freshmen, were supposed to be defining/explaining a set of terms from their textbook.  This was a unit on a variety of Mesopotamian civilizations, so when "Nebuchadnezzar" showed up with the definition "a really big bottle of wine," I had a serious "Huh?" moment.  Entering "define:  nebuchadnezzar" in Google pulled that up as the first option, which apparently looked good enough--not good, but good enough.  There again is the comparative problem.  I have many examples of this as an ongoing issue, and most are not nearly so ridiculous.

What constitutes validity?  We teach primary and secondary sources, not tertiary.  Every tertiary source is going to have problems.  I never met a textbook that didn't.  I have been saddled with many textbooks over the years, but the absolute worst was laden with political bias which drove me nuts.  Students of history learn a variety of techniques to judge whether a particular work is worth citing--beginning with questions like who wrote it, what authority does the creator have, how is the writer judged within the context of the academic community, when was it written, on what sources was it based, can it be confirmed, and so forth.  The anonymous nature of contributors to wikis like Wikipedia make them automatically suspect, but the bottom line is that any encyclopedia is a tertiary source, which is well beneath older students to use for anything but quick reference or background reading anyway.

Several years ago, I read an online article explaining how Wikipedia entries were actually generating their own references.  A story, fact, or anecdote lands in an entry without citation.  Then it is used by a reputable journalist or writer, at which point that use is added as a citation to the erroneous information on the Wikipedia page.  Anybody else running across said story now has what appears to be a perfectly valid reference for it, and he/she cites it as authoritative.  This is a really frightening chain of events made possible by the online environment and the way wikis work.  

YouTube videos pose some of the same problems.  Obviously the quality and content are all over the place in terms of consistency.  I am a pretty heavy user of YouTube, and I have dozens of videos which have for years been embedded in my Blackboard site for my students to play at home without having to search for them.  Now, I know the value of the content I teach and the validity of the information I post to YouTube.  It's there for my students, and if that benefits other people, then that's just a bonus.  Occasionally I get really good questions from people that are worth answering in that forum.  The comments, however, can be really horrible!  Our YouTube account is in my husband's name, and he automatically bans people critiquing my body or making other nasty, personal remarks.  Most account holders just ignore the nastiness, which then poses a problem when a teacher wants to share a video laden with irrelevant or disgusting comments no matter the quality of the video itself.  The high school I recently left adopted the policy last year of requiring any video, regardless of source, to be approved before it is shared with students during class, on Blackboard, or through email.  Teachers grumbled about that, but it was better than the outright ban on YouTube that many schools in my county have in place already.

There are no easy answers to questions like "Should students trust information from non-vetted sources?"  The answer for me is a resounding, "Maybe."