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@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@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-journal?bftw&utm_term=4ldqpfp#4ldqpfp
>
> 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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