I see this as two different issues. The first issue is that the education environment believes that students are doing research for their papers and projects using only Wikipedia. This leads for the skills involved in independent research not being taught early in the life of a student. I am unsure if this is true over a wide demographic of students, but was definitely present in a background research paper my daughter did while at her father’s house. She is only in fourth grade, so there is a lot of time to help her gain these skills, but I do feel that it is present in the current generation of students. This is more of a short coming of how students are taught not the limitation of research material easily available.

The second issue is what people do consider authoritative. Society is moving from trusting job titles as a accreditation for knowledge towards a folksonomy or a ranked system(do not know this word like Digg or star reviews). Even Google’s Knol uses a public ranking system to qualify the creditability of article. People would not generally trust an article with 1 star even if it was written by a Harvard professor.

I agree with Sharman Lichtenstein that Wikipedia is helping students not do well rounded research, but this is not Wikipedia’s fault. This is a result of the poor state of the average education in America. Don Tapscott gave a much better explanation of this during his keynote address to the Horizon 2008. http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/04/don-tapscott-speaks-out-on-education.html

I was talking with several college and high school students about this three days ago. Their solution? Go to Wikipedia, use the information there, and cite the External Links at the bottom of the page as references. If the page doesn’t have any External References, don’t use that page.

Somehow the kids are spoofing the adults yet again.

But seriously folks, Wikipedia is a good source of information – not the only source of information – but one good one.

My take is that school teachers are jealous of the Wikipedia contributors. That is what education debates usually boil down to. The union didn’t invent it, so it must be bad.

I am an IT teacher and coordinator at an international school in Bahrain. I have been having a running argument about this topic for the last year or so with the people at IB (the International Baccalaureate Organization) who take a very dim view of Wikipedia. Visit them at http://www.ibo.org

When Wikipedia first started it was like the wild west and people could write anything. Now I think that it is a fairly reliable place to start. The studies that have been done by the BBC show Wikipedia to be essentially as accurate as the encyclopedia Britannica.

In my own subject they have said that wikipedia may not appear in a bibliography, no exceptions. As if even going to the site somehow taints the whole work. The objection seems to be that Wikipedia is not an established source (nor an establishment source) and that the masses could not possibly put anything reliable together on their own.

I tell my students to use Wikipedia as the starting point, follow the references back to their source and put those in the bibliography. Just like the other comment said, students are getting around the teachers.

I have never been provided with a reason as to why an article from Wikipedia that has citations which can be checked may not be used. Only references to its unreliability (see above). This is an old school approach to learning, and will not satisfy our kids anymore than the other old school approaches.

BTW I love the wikinomics site and point my kids here every chance I get. Keep up the good work.

What do you expect from a program that was crafted by an organization whose goal it is to become a world socialist totalitarian government? The students might find out the truth about something and we can’t have that.

IBO wouldn’t give you a reason? Now why don’t I find that surprising! LOL!