Are teachers being unreasonable in their hate of Wikipedia?

We all know what Wikipedia is. Many of us who have pursued higher education also know that teachers seem to hate Wikipedia.

The most common reason they give for doing so is that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, so it is unreliable. While that may be true sometimes, the large majority of the time, a Wikipedia article is a good article. The WikiPolice are usually very good at catching and reverting vandalism. Also, articles that are frequent targets of vandalism can be set so that only registered users with a good history can edit them. Lots of online sources that are not open to anonymous editors can be unreliable. Even printed sources can be unreliable, though at a lesser rate than online sources

Some high school and college teachers I've talked to have admitted that they don't like Wikipedia because it makes thing easier for their students. My question is, why is that a bad thing? As long as the student learned what needed to be learned from the assignment, why should it matter how long it took or how much digging the student had to do to complete it? That argument hold less merit than the first one, imo. I can see where this can be a problem if the assignment requires very specific, technical research; but for general information, Wikipedia is often reliable.

I'm not talking about plagiarism, btw. I know that lazy students will plagiarize Wikipedia. Intentional, uncited plagiarism is unacceptable, but it can come from other sources than Wikipedia. I'm talking about when a student references Wikipedia for information and does cite it, not when a student plagiarizes from Wikipedia.

What are your thoughts on this?

Discuss.

Careful With That Axe said:

I don't think teachers hate Wikipedia per se, they hate the fact that people cite Wikipedia as the source of information for their work, when most info doesn't really originate from there.

I have used Wikipedia in college as a site where I can find information from different sources, and if I cite/research those sources instead of attributing all the info to Wikipedia, it's all fine.

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Why would they hate when students cite Wikipedia, though?

Wikipedia doesn't count as a primary or secondary source since it's an encyclopedia. Universities at least (I dunno about high schools) will not let you cite any encyclopedia.

If people have objections other than that, I don't like it. Wikipedia is generally reliable and a study was done that found that Wikipedia has almost as few errors as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Myles said:

Wikipedia doesn't count as a primary or secondary source since it's an encyclopedia. Universities at least (I dunno about high schools) will not let you cite any encyclopedia.

If people have objections other than that, I don't like it. Wikipedia is generally reliable and a study was done that found that Wikipedia has almost as few errors as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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My school doesn't have a campus-wide ban on citing encyclopedias. That is a decision made by individual instructors. Even when the instructor permits or doesn't expressly prohibit the use of encyclopedias, Wikipedia is still looked down upon.

In general I think they prefer printed material because it can't change. Anything on the web can change, or be removed, or only have limited access. So let's say your wiki article cites the Oxford English Dictionary. Unless you have access to a physical copy of it you're going to need a subscription to get to their website. Ain't got neither of them and you basically can't use it. If you get enough cases like this Wikipedia's usefulness drops considerably.

Part of a good education is learning how to research things. Wikipedia, for all it contains, doesn't cover everything or every nuance of a topic. If you get into the mindset that you can find everything on Wikipedia, that your one source fairly balances opposing views, then you're being intellectually lazy. With Wikipedia especially you can find an article that has maybe 6 or 7 sources listed at the end of the page, with larger articles having more. I'd bet there are more than 6 or 7 sources in the world on any topic so even if you go to those sources you're still going to sources that someone else put there and which may overall not wholly represent the topic fairly, or at the very least it could keep you from developing your own viewpoint. So, yeah. I can see why teachers would prefer if you didn't go to Wikipedia, though I know some teachers who are fine with it... as a starting point. They just don't want you limit yourself to that site and the ones it links you to. They also want you to do research that is whole independent of Wikipedia.

I'm mixed on this. On the good side, Wikipedia has a huge about of information, and is pretty much a compilation of every single info site on the Internet, seeing how anybody can edit it.

This is also the main reason why teachers hate Wikipedia, seeing as people can and fake information to it. Plus, it's articles usually use words that most students (or even teachers) don't know the meaning of.

I do like Wikipedia, but I take care of the information I use so that it isn't absurd.

I don't necessarily agree with citing Wikipedia, but if I ever "need" to use Wikipedia as a source, I simply look to see if Wikipedia's own citations are available online. If so, I follow the link, check out the source, and if it looks accurate, I use it. If it's not cited, I probably shouldn't be using that information anyway. Wikipedia is a tool that, if used correctly, can be very helpful with research.

What do you guys think about this part of my OP?:
Some high school and college teachers I've talked to have admitted that they don't like Wikipedia because it makes thing easier for their students. My question is, why is that a bad thing? As long as the student learned what needed to be learned from the assignment, why should it matter how long it took or how much digging the student had to do to complete it? That argument hold less merit than the first one, imo. I can see where this can be a problem if the assignment requires very specific, technical research; but for general information, Wikipedia is often reliable.

Some claim that the nature of education will change in the future in that rote memorization of facts will be de-emphasized and that more emphasis will be placed on knowing how to effectively search for information. As a proponent of academics I find this generally abhorrent, but with the digitization of books, data banks like Wikipedia that seek to accumulate the sum of all human knowledge, etc., our culture seems to be moving inexorably in this direction.

My experience in college lead me to believe that there were three main reasons for professors refusing to accept Wikipedia as a source. These were 1.) questions over Wikipedia's accuracy because of its "anyone can edit" policy and a few high profile cases of article vandalism that have been in the media over the years, 2.) belief that ease of access to the site precluded even the possibility of any real effort going into research, and 3.) good old-fashioned technophobia. As more people who grew up with the internet enter professorial positions, I expect this to change, though. Going back to my first paragraph, if the acquisition of information pertaining to a subject becomes a trivial matter that can be done in seconds or minutes through the internet, the amount of "effort" that goes into compiling information for essays should become less and less relevant.

Purely informational essays may become a thing of the past and essays that emphasize interpretation of information and synthesis of ideas from information will become more important. People will be evaluated on how well they use information once they've acquired it. In my opinion good professors already evaluate students on how they synthesize ideas and reach conclusions (in addition to, not in place of, committing important facts to memory), but not every educator is there yet. I had college classes with tests consisting of "match term A to definition B" like I would have in junior high school. Widespread acceptance of Wikipedia as a legitimate academic source will eventually reach schools and universities, but it won't be in the immediate future. Online knowledge repositories must become even more common in all aspects of learning than they already are and Wikipedia must fade from its monopoly and be but one of many such vastly enormous repositories before educators change their stance.

Note to students: one way to get around prohibitions on citing Wikipedia as a source is to cite one of the external citation sources listed at the bottom of any Wikipedia article. If it's a site, just check it for information relevant to what you're trying to cite and most professors won't bat an eye. I only give this advice because I always hated citations with a burning passion. I understand why they're necessary, but it doesn't make them any less of a miserable chore, and it sucks when you have to formulate an entire essay around a few quotes when you just want your mind to run free.

If it's a short article sometimes only 6 or 7 sources are needed. The idea is to get a view on the subject that is directly proportional to the prevalence of that view in reliable sources (yes, even Wikipedia won't let you cite an encyclopedia). If a page is too long and only has a few citations, it will be noted at the top that the article needs more citations. Having a look at a featured article, say today's featured article shows: 36 sources and four external links. And it only has five A4 pages of data (20 paragraphs and two tables).

You can't really count weak articles amongst the A-class articles, good articles, and featured articles (these are ranks Wikipedia has for articles), because most of those probably wouldn't even exist in a normal encyclopedia. Try putting false information on any high profile page and watch it disappear in seconds.