I have never considered user-generated content on
Wikipedia to be more
than what librarians call a "discovery service".
Briefly skimming an article on a subject l may know little about, I
invariably evaluate the sources rather than the text and hit the cited
references. In my 15-year experience, even the weakest and most apparently
biased articles have at least a few refs that lead to citable sources and
larger literature.
On Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 11:54 AM Merrilee Proffitt <mproffitt(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
I completely agree with Kathleen. I would assert that it is a lack of
nuance around the nature of information sources and the research task at
hand that has lead educators and others to wholesale "ban" the use of
Wikipedia.
Whether or not a source can be utilized in a research context depends on
the researcher, and what information they are supporting with the citation.
For my middle school daughter doing some investigation on an element in the
periodic table (as she has been doing this week), the Wikipedia English
article (or any encyclopedia article) is appropriate for her. For a
graduate student in chemistry this would not be appropriate, but the grad
student might (appropriately) cite Wikipedia for some basic definitional
stuff, just as they might cite a dictionary or something similar. You see
Wikipedia utilized appropriately in citations all the time -- why would we
discourage this?
Having conversations about the veracity of online information is tough.
Wikipedia can be challenging because articles are at various levels of
development. To my mind, this makes it something that those of us engaged
in conversations around information literacy should steer towards, rather
than away from, because a) Wikipedia is widely utilized in a variety of
contexts and b) it is a great teaching tool for talking about when you can
trust information online and when you should steer clear. But saying "no"
to *any* information source without having a discussion about it seems
lazy. It definitely does not reflect the type of discourse we should be
having, especially now.
I look forward to more discussion on this topic.
Merrilee
On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 9:02 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Twitter doesn't facilitate reasoned
arguments. I suppose as usual the
goal was to encourage greater use of the references and other
meta-content of Wikipedia articles, which are excellent tools for
critical thinking.
Federico
Kathleen DeLaurenti, 26/09/19 17:55:
Hi all -
As a librarian who uses and supports Wikipedia, I wanted to bring up
some issues around the BuzzFeed article posted today about M-Journal
that has led to some messaging from the WikipediaUK twitter account
that
I find concerning. I'm not sure if this is
the appropriate place to
bring this up, but I wasn't sure where else to reach out.
For those who missed, a citation cite is not manufacturing journal
articles if a student submits a Wiki article so that it looks like an
"official" citation in their school research papers.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/wikipedia-fake-academic-…
Clearly there are some nefarious potential uses here, but what's more
concerning is that the WikiUK twitter account has come forward
forcefully saying that Wikipedia shouldn't be cited in the literature.
Period.
https://twitter.com/wikimediauk/status/1177215917534711808
I work very hard to improve the cite through my courses and academic
advocacy as do many librarians. It's concern to me to see Wikipedia
undermining its own authority in such a public way in what appears to
be
a misguided attempt to deflect association with
the MJournal site.
Would welcome any insight or ideas on how to navigate this discussion.
The entire M-Journal use case exists, imho, because we are still
battling for a critical (not blanket acceptance) view of Wiki as a
resources, and I find this kind of public statement to be very
damaging
to the hard work so many are doing to create a
quality information
resource.
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