My wife is a Professor of Art History who has large classes of undergrads, and has mentioned in the past her view that most professors expect far too little of their students when it comes to research and citation.

I guess I was working off of the original closing line of the post: “But if we do this and the professors continue to accept garbage citations from their students, I don’t think much of what we say is going to have much of an impact.” But I understand you have a more nuanced vision of what Wikipedia has to offer than that.

I, too, love the Jimmy Wales quote “For God’s sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

And I don’t want to detract from your main point, which–it seems to me–is the lack of understanding on students’ parts of the distinctions and nuances of academic and other information sources. If I have time, I plan to write a little more about this today on my blog. Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

Yes, of course a layman can know a lot about a topic, but a person writing something on a Website (that isn’t reviewed) could just as easily be making things up or could be disguising opinion as fact. Should the student just trust something on faith when they don’t know who wrote it or that it was reviewed or verified by experts in the field?

I agree with comments above though… we have to stop seeing wikipedia as bad. If it is one of 8 sources that’s fine. It’s more about context. I have helped several students track down refs via a wikipedia entry. It’s a great starting point.

As for the issue of profs… I think as next gen faculty come along this concept will be blurred even more. We want to push the info lit concept but not come across as old-fashioned. We need to make it relevant and less abstract…. but great post.

Of course I agree that students should be taught to be critical of every source they; that was the goal of the activity I did with the students in the ENGL 101 class. And I think that the Wikipedia is an excellent tool for teaching students to be critical of sources.

The great thing about Wikipedia is that, with just a little discussion, it foregrounds the sausage-making aspect of publication and “information” and “knowledge” and all that. Simply saying “don’t use Wikipedia!” seems like a missed opportunity to me.

I’d like to see more teachers and faculty have their students read Wikipedia critically. Read an article, then read the discussion page, then look at the history. Is this a controversial topic? How can you tell? Are the article authors citing sources? Can you follow them up? And so on.

Because (a) I believe students should be approaching more traditional sources in a similar fashion; asking “who is saying this, how do they know this, and why are they saying it in quite this fashion” are always good questions. And (b) because the world is a lot more like Wikipedia than it is like a refereed journal article, and the skills they develop in interrogating and evaluating a Wikipedia article will server them well in the future.

I think this would help with your major point here, which is that most students don’t even think about any of these issues unless they are actually taught.

(Just provoking discussion here.)