Dreams & Swords
March 2007 issue
Backissues
Dreams & Swords
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
- Amy Lowell (Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds)
Wikipedia: Love it or hate it, or maybe a little of both. Middlebury College was in the news recently (the higher ed news, that is) for the move by its history department to ban students from using Wikipedia as a source they could cite in their research papers and other work. As the head of the department was quoted as saying, "The important point that we wish to communicate to all students taking courses and submitting work
is that they cite Wikipedia at their peril." ("A Stand Against Wikipedia" Higher Education, January 26, 2007.)
It's nothing new for students to hear a professor tell them that they are not to use encyclopedias as cited works in their research. Actually, this has been the norm for a long, long time. This isn't to say that encyclopedias are bad things. They serve a valuable purpose. If you need to research a topic on which you know absolutely nothing, or very little, a good encyclopedia can provide you with a broad overview of your topic and help point you toward those types of sources you can cite in your final paper, or speech, or whatever. The main bone of contention with Wikipedia is that it's too democratic (this democratic nature has been one of the things others have herald about it). It's democratic in that anyone can go into Wikipedia and add an entry or edit an already existing entry (what is called open-source) regardless of whether or not he or she actually knows anything about the topic; let alone whether or not he or she is an expert on said topic. And since creators and editors names don't appear with the entries, a user is utterly clueless as to who wrote what's been found. I speak from experience, having edited the entry on the Library to correct some misinformation on Frank (Frank's a stickler for truth and you know, it's not like he can do it himself
he's very old school
he's never learned to use a computer).
Within higher education there isn't complete agreement on the direction Middlebury has taken, and it should be mentioned that Wikipedia has taken some measures to improve its product, though not the open-source nature that has been fundamental to its identity (Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder and now critic, recently announced the creation of Citizendium - the better mousetrap). In the Inside Higher Education article, Stephen Bell, a librarian at Temple University, has stated that he applauds the effort to try and direct students toward sources that are reliable, academic, authoritative sources, but "
to say 'don't use that one' might take students in the wrong direction from the perspective of information literacy
(s)tudents face 'an ocean of information' today, much of it of poor quality
". Librarians are finding ways to use Wikipedia to teach students how to think critically about resources, such as taking a Wikipedia entry and then finding other sources to verify (or contradict) the information in the entry.
And if you're a student and would like a peer perspective, try this.
Eric A. Kidwell
Director of the Library