Interesting use for Wikipedia...
Those of you who have talked to me about Wikipedia know that I rant and rave about my displeasure with the whole notion. However, my son's friend at school, Beth, sent me an interesting thank-you note, as you can see from the picture below. (I felt so wicked going into Wikipedia to delete it!) Who imagined there would actually be an entry for this?
Kathy Schrock
Labels: Kathy Schrock, Wikipedia
posted by Kathy Schrock at 5:37 PM
4 Comments:
Are you 100% down on wikipedia? I'm mixed. You (or some readers of this blog) might be interested in a lesson I did with my 4th graders involving wikipedia. Blogged about it here: http://medinger.wordpress.com/2006/10/27/charlotte-on-wikipedia/
I do not yet feel contributory encyclopedias are the answer to our information needs. Thanks for sharing your lesson, and there are many good suggestions out there on the ways to use Wikipedia to show students that the information may be bogus...my question is, "If you don't have a knowledge base in the topic, how do you know the information is bogus or correct?"
It is a lot harder to apply the customary critical evaluation principles to this process, since there is often no way to find out anything about the "experts". If the user has to go find other articles from juried sources to prove if the info in Wikipedia is right or wrong, why not go to the juried articles first and skip Wikipedia altogether?
IMHO...off my soapbox now!
I must admit that I am surprised that there isn't a biographical "Kathy Schrock" article on Wikipedia. Someone should create it. But not me.
As for the question of evaluation of the articles on Wikipedia I am with you to some extent. I worry about the same thing. I do quote or link to wikipedia articles from time to time but I do so only when what I read there matches with what I know from other sources. That is to say that I use a link to wikipedia to give others more information about something I know something about. I find wikipedia a useful shortcut that way.
As for looking up things I don't know something about I confess that I use wikipedia for that from time to time. I am not sure I would quote it as a source unless I was also quoting other sources as well. But honestly I am not sure I would feel comfortable with any single source for anything important. I go to wikipedia to look for starting points not ending ones.
The theory behind wikipedia is wonderful - people who know will correct wrong information. But theory and practice do not always match. And facts look different from different perspectives.
Kathy the New Yorker magazine has a really neat article about Wikipedia at
http://www.newyorker.com/
fact/content/articles/
060731fa_fact
I really enjoyed finding more about where it all comes from. It is both interesting and scary at the same time that my grade 3-4 students are now choosing to both Google and wikipedia as their main tools of choice to source information despite rejoinders from me to check a range of sources. At this level whenever as source says a "fact is a fact", then their mindset seems to be "it must be fact".
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