My Experience with Wikipedia, and School
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010I dropped out of college when I found that I was not ready (read: too lazy) to finish a degree the third try around. I got a job, and ended up working my way around New Jersey and New York until I found myself in the enviable position of opening the Interactive Team at Fort Group, Inc. (note: please don’t judge the design of that site. We know it’s awful, and are working to fix it.)
Anyway, I decided to finish a college degree so I could say I had the piece of paper. I’m attending the County College of Morris, and pursuing a Associate of Science in Business Administration. I had started (10 years ago) a Computer Science Degree, but I find that college professors in that field teach very little in the way of current programming skills, focusing more on theory. This is fine, but my theory is solidly grounded and I don’t need any more. If I find I do, I research what I need on the Internet and have had little trouble over the past 10 years implementing whatever it is I need to do. Moving on.
In the library, I attended a session on how to do research in the library. I can see why they would do it; there’s tools the reference librarian giving the lecture showed us that would not have been apparent to someone just walking in to do some research. However, it struck me as interesting how vehemently opposed she was to the idea of doing research on the Internet. Her objection to it partly came as no surprise; any 12 year old with a WordPress account can call themselves an author, publisher, architect, or whatever catches their fancy on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, she did single out Wikipedia as a “completely unreliable source” of information. Her reason being that “anyone can edit Wikipedia.”
This is a belief I find over and over again, and I must point out a couple of things.
- Wikipedia is free – You are not paying for Wikipedia. They are funded by their parent organization, Wikimedia. Most any other reference material online is available on a pay-per-use basis; if I need a quick article on Pablo Picasso, I’m not going to pay for something if I can find information for free.
- Wikipedia is controlled – If an article gets a lot of edits, Wikipedia freezes the article, make sure everything is correct in it, and then will sometimes semi-protect it from edits by any anonymous user. Wikipedia errors are generally corrected within minutes by an administrator.
- Students are not inherently stupid – This is what I find most frustrating about going back to school. On the main page of Wikipedia’s English Site, you will find the words “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
Why do teachers think that if a student sees free information on the Internet, they believe it must be correct? I am not an imbecile; part of writing a research paper is making sure that the sources I find are written by authors that are credible. If I find an article on the Internet, it might enhance or prove my point, but if I have no idea where it came from or who wrote it, I would not use it. This goes for Wikipedia; as cool as I think the concept is, I don’t know who is editing it.
This is not to say I’m going to speak out against teachers that oppose Wikipedia; I just think that pointing out the obvious to students is enough. The folks over at Wikipedia put a lot of time in on that project, and don’t deserve to be ridiculed by self-titled experts, (which everyone on the Internet is anyway) just because their efforts are sometimes inhibited by a 9 year old that thinks it would be funny to vandalize George Washington’s entry in the site.
County College of Morris pays numerous publishers for the use of articles online, most of which are not otherwise accessible unless you have a subscription. This is a good thing; it allows students (most of which have little in the way of means) to do their research without having to pay for it.
All in all, I found her lecture rather insulting. To say that the only people that are allowed to have a say in the matter of literature (the class we were researching for) should have doctorates in the field is pure idiocy. I happen to have my own opinions on the materials that we read, and they often do not intersect those of our instructor. However, I back up my points with references to the material, and he does concede that my opinions are valid.
All in all, I suppose I don’t really have much use for any classes that aren’t teaching me about business administration. The social convention is to get a degree. The social expectation is that you’ll get paid better. The fact that my motivation for getting a degree is money should tell you something. The fact that I have to go through classes that mean nothing to me and I will take nothing away from is part of the not-very-enjoyable process.
tl;dr: Students know better than to exclusively research with Wikipedia, and Teachers should respect the body of work it represents a little more. In the very least, it represents a social phenomenon: that many people getting together to build something as structured as Wikipedia is pretty remarkable. One last thing: Britannica has errors too.