The Wikipedia Dilemma

By Noah Geisel

This school year, millions of students will participate in the time-honored tradition of writing research papers. They will formulate a thesis statement and seek out evidence from reliable sources that supports their claims. In recent years, this seemingly straightforward premise has been complicated by the definition of what constitutes reliable sources.

Some of these students will be told by their skeptical instructors that they may not use any information found on the web. I worry about the sustainability of this approach as newspaper, magazine and traditional book publishing are dwindling and some libraries are moving toward closing their stacks altogether.

Many more students will be told that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. For some, this is a no-brainer while for others it is a travesty. The key question in this debate has nothing to do with Wikipedia or any other source. What we need to be asking ourselves is: What is the point of the research paper? Five, fifteen and fifty years from now, do we want students to know the information they learned from their research topics or is the real value in what future graduates will be able to do, namely seek out information, evaluate it for relevance and accuracy and, ultimately, analyze and synthesize it in order to make an informed argument? If you are in the former camp, you can stop reading now and skip down to comments section to tell me how foolish I am.

For those of us in the latter camp, I believe we need to re-think our approach to defining reliable sources. We need to ask ourselves if we are doing students any favors by compartmentalizing for them which sources are authoritative and reliable and which are not. Even if we coach our students to steer clear of Wikipedia, fringe media and news sources they have never heard of, we are not shielding them from seizing on erroneous information. Three examples:

1. Investigative journalism found in such mainstream sources as The New Republic, Harper’s and Rolling Stone may safely be considered reliable. If you are going to tell your students what is and is not reliable however, just make sure they avoid articles written for these magazines by Stephen Glass, who was fired from them all in 1998 when it was found that he had fabricated all or parts of dozens of stories on topics as important as the Clinton White House and the D.A.R.E. program.

2. For a few hours one morning last March, many were duped into believing that Cheif Justice Roberts was resigning from the Supreme Court. Georgetown Law professor Peter Tague, an indisputably authoritative source, assured his class that he had inside information that Roberts would be resigning and within minutes the news had been picked up by a number of “reliable” news organizations, based on the students' tweets and FB updates. Thirty minutes later, Tague revealed to his students that it was a prank intended to show them that even reliable sources could disseminate inaccurate information.

3. While eating at a chain restaurant last summer, my friend at the head of the table had a different tip total everyone needed to chip in than I did. I asked him to double-check his math but he smugly pointed to the tip calculator printed at the bottom of the receipt and boasted that the computer had already done the math for him. Five people then pulled out their cell phones and jaws dropped as we discovered that the tip calculator was not a reliable source. The 18% calculation was actually over 25%.

A teacher’s blanket assertion that Wikipedia and other web-based sources are not reliable is troubling as it falls prey to the very trap we want our students avoid: not thinking for themselves. Clive Thompson has an article in this month’s issue of Wired in which he presents research suggesting that students today are not effective at searching for information. He minces no words in assessing the problem: “...the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school.”

It is essential that as we prepare students for post-secondary success in the 21st Century, we use the research paper as an opportunity to teach critical thinking skills not only in employing sources to support their opinions but in evaluating the sources. In the case of Wikipedia, there are plenty of academic entries that have been compiled by reliable sources and peer reviewed for accuracy. These should be fair game as sources. The answer to the Wikipedia Dilemma is not in telling students where they should and should not look for information but in equipping them with the skills needed to exercise due diligence in assessing the reliability of their sources.

One solution specific to the Wikipedia Dilemma that may make everyone happy could be the introduction of a new protocol for annotated bibliographies. If students choose to cite a Wikipedia entry, they would also be expected to sub-cite the information by seeking the original source of a specific claim in the References at the bottom of the page and stating how they had verified it for reliability.