Is Wikipedia bad for children?     045

The one thing that all teachers seem to agree on is that children should not use Wikipedia as a source of information when completing assignments and indeed university students are told the same thing. Wikipedia is not appropriate, teachers say, because the quality is unreliable. Children cannot trust the information as it could be wrong, and of course this is true, the information could be wrong, or incomplete or misleading.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Wikipedia marks what has been called a fundamental change “in the relationship between text, its creators and users… an ongoing unfinished process [in a] new knowledge space” (Alex Bruns, in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond, From Production to Produsage, 2008, p. 138). This means in short that Wikipedia is very much characteristic of and indeed a product of the development of what is called Web 2.0, a second generation technology which allows users to interact in a new and flexible way. So in Wikipedia the users themselves create the content and are responsible for it.

Well who are these creative people?  They are everyone, a whole community of contributors which takes responsibility for evaluation and indeed ownership. Wikipedia actually does have different user administration levels and a type of governance structure. This partly explains the good quality that is evident in the Wikipedia articles. So one might suppose, that just perhaps, Wikipedia might be useful for a quick overview of a topic, perhaps affording just a glance at some type of structure or something.

But what if inside a Wikipedia article there were some sort of factual statement. Could someone have just put it there, quite incorrectly, just for fun or some malicious purpose, hoping perhaps to trip up some innocent student’s first journey into serious research.

Well, yes, it is possible. A recent article (James Massola, Wiki mischief: public servants changing encyclopaedia entries, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Oct 2016, pp. 1, 7) reports that an analysis by Fairfax Media of “the WikiWatchdog website… indicates that some 8790 pages have been anonymously altered by staff across several federal government departments over the past decade”. Most of these changes were “innocuous” but some had the potential to cause political embarrassment to the government.

So what is the school student to do? In most Wikipedia articles I have read, and I might add, used, statements are mostly sourced with a reference number, and the user can go to the end of the article and find out where that information came from. Usually there is a hyperlink, that is by clicking on that source the user can go there directly, and read the information in the original source. And of course at the same time the authority of that source can be evaluated.

Now what if this original source, which the student has tracked down, is unreliable? How could we know?  Well, it is a matter of using a number of sources and applying a number of research criteria. Learning to do this is a process called education—and that’s what students are supposed to be experiencing at school. I think that finding the answer to all this will be easy—go to Wikipedia, and start learning “new literacies and capacities… [in a] new knowledge space” (that’s Alex Bruns, again, p. 140). Perhaps teachers don’t want it to be this easy.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services