On 26 Sep 2005 18:32:18 -0000, erickaakcire.1532473@bloglines.com <erickaakcire.1532473@bloglines.com> wrote:
I teach a public speaking & rhetoric class in college - largely to sophomore pharmacy majors, and I'm grading the first batch of speeches which are on a topic of the student's choosing but must be focused on social science. I've got about 15% of the speeches that uncritically cite the Wikipedia - clearly treating it as just another encyclopedia without knowledge of how it is written - or at least no mention of this. (I thought I mentioned what the Wikipedia is in at least one section, but perhaps not.)
What I'm doing is explaining what it is and that it's a good place to look for background info but that they need to cite the original resources to use the material in their speeches. I'd also encourage them to do this for any encyclopedic sources. I could think of scenarios where it might be acceptable to cite the Wikipedia as proof of norms or accepted beliefs.
So next week I'm going to discuss this with my classes along with more on source credibility generally.
Any suggestions? How have you handled this? (I'm particularly interested in responses from other Wikipedia contributors & supporters.)
Ericka, I suspect you're not the only person in academia facing this issue. I'm an administrator on Wikipedia, and do research about the project as well. I'm a fan of students reading it, learning from it, and contributing to it, but I tell them, I'll mark them down if they cite it as a source or authority on anything. You should have them read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia Specifically, I've added this to the "Citing Wikipedia" section, which I hope helps: "First you should question the appropriateness of citing any encyclopedia as a source or reference. This is not simply a Wikipedia-specific issue, as most secondary schools and institutions of higher learning do not consider encyclopedias, in general, a proper citable source. "This does not mean Wikipedia is not useful - Wikipedia articles contain many links to newspaper articles, books with ISBN numbers, radio programming, television shows, Web-based sources, and the like. It will usually be more acceptable to cite those original sources rather than Wikipedia since it is by nature, a secondary source. "There are cases where contributions to Wikipedia are considered original and important enough on topics not covered in other works, so as to be considered a primary source. (For example, the article "f---" was used in a Colorado court of law to illustrate the vernacular use of that term.) "Owing to the radical openness of Wikipedia, decisions about referencing articles must be made on an article by article basis and . If one does choose to cite a Wikipedia article, references should identify a specific version of an article by providing the date and time it was created. This can be found in the edit history of the article."
Thanks, Ericka Menchen Trevino
Graduate Student http://blog.erickamenchen.net
-Andrew Lih University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Studies Centre