Every once in a while, I'll read a newspaper article that says "According to Wikipedia..." I'm always struck by the ridiculousness of this. No one should be citing Wikipedia. People (students, journalists, anyone) should be citing the sources that Wikipedia provides as footnotes. Well, the American Journalism Review has a piece asking editors' their feelings about citing Wikipedia, and I think it could be a great starting point for teachers and students talking about research and citation. Here's an excerpt from the article:

So I was preparing to start off class today with a brief warning about using Wikipedia as a source when I checked out the site's entry for "globalization."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

I was struck by the number of "dubious - discuss" tags throughout.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Globalization#Dubious

In most of this section, the discussion centers around suggested wordings and rewrites, use of evidence, etc.

I will definitely work this into my class at some point in the next week or two, but wanted to know if anyone has used this feature of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.

In my class today, we edited the Wikipedia entry for the novel we've been reading - Microserfs.

We began by discussing the basics of Wikipedia - what kind of resource it is, how people use it (or how they should use it), and what rules apply when editing entries. Then we looked at the Wikipedia Novels Template. This gave students an idea of the rules of the game and what should or should not (according to the Wikipedia community) go into an article about a novel. Then we spent the rest of the classing making additions.

While browsing wikipedia, I ran into the section on Wikibooks. These are books/textbooks on various topics. And, of course, they are edited on the wiki format. Check out the Composition Wikibook or the one on literary criticism. I wonder if these would be useful in the classroom. I also wonder if a good classroom exercise might be for students to write a section/chapter of one of these books.

Brian Bremen forwarded this on. It's Alan Liu's suggestion for a wikipedia policy for the classroom. It's not brand new - it was posted on Kairosnews about a month ago. We've had conversations on the blog in the past about calling certain sources off-limits, such as the dictionary. Liu doesn't make it off-limits, but he makes it clear what wikipedia is for:

http://kairosnews.org/developing-a-wikipedia-research-policy