In the New Jersey Express Times yesterday, there was a truly depressing story of a public librarian putting up signs on the computers in the library in which she works urging people to ‘Just Say No to Wikipedia’
Isn’t it time we moved on from this attitude? Now I know that Wikipedia can be inaccurate, and it certainly isn’t the beginning and end of online research, but it does provide a valuable service. Though I do think it’s important to warn students of the potential problems of using Wikipedia as a key research tool, and encourage them to look farther afield, surely education about how to use Wikipedia properly is more important than scaring people away from it?
I’m sure that students (especially high school aged ones) probably overuse it, and don’t know how to use it properly (I’m sure there a great many non-students who do too). But surely it’s our job as librarians to help broaden our users scope, rather than closing it off? Put up signs pointing them to other online resources that they might want to view, or to the reference desk, or to the hard copy encyclopaedias even, rather than just telling them to not use the site. Encourage further avenues of research, point out places they can go. If you’re in a position to be educating students, get them to critique Wikipedia articles, to discover for themselves where the inconsistencies are, and learn some critical resource evaluation skills in the process.
One of the best uses of Wikipedia is as a pointer to further information. I use it frequently, usually to get an overview of topics that I know very little about. I’ll usually read the first paragraph or so, and then go straight to the links section at the bottom the page, which always seems to turn up sites that I probably wouldn’t have found on my own. And yes, I do take any of the content that I read there with a grain of salt, but honestly? I’ve found it to be right far more than wrong. Admittedly, the type of articles that I tend to view on Wikipedia (predominantly tech, legal and economic articles, when I come across an area I’m unfamiliar with) are the better written - these don’t really get as much malicious tinkering, or polarised opinion as some of the more contentious articles - but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t valuable information in an article on the American Civil War, or the crisis in Darfur, for example. I use it not just for personal research, but also in my work (though never as a primary resource - there are some professional standards to maintain!), and I’m happy to do so.
The trick, I feel, isn’t in not using Wikipedia, it’s in learning how to use it critically and carefully.
Tags:
education,
libraries,
wikipedia
Related posts
Recent Comments