Certainly there is a lot of crap on the Internet. And certainly any information you get (even from a fairly reliable source, like Wikipedia) should be cross-checked against other known and widely accepted provenances. But having information at our fingertips is not a negative! I think the problem you are defining here might have a lot to do with a generational transition. Us older people need to keep educating ourselves as well.

Congratulations on a well-deserved Stermy Award.

the reason why site like wiki are an automatic fail is simply lazy, lazy tutors. if we are talking about university students, then let them use any and all sources. if we teach them to blindy accept textbooks what have they really learned?

i agree with HS students it might be a different story, but even then what teacher actually sits through 30 papers and verifies every single reference to make sure they are acceptable…

Regards
Michael

In an ideal world, all sources of educational information would be heavily peer reviewed and be written by well verified authors. The fact remains, however, that lots of printed material is ghost written, vanity press garbage or worse. Giving printed material extra credibility simply because it is solid and in your hands is a massive mistake to make.

Um, I wasn’t saying “all printed material”, I was talking specifically about textbooks, because the assertion was that challenging textbooks was as important as challenging websites. Textbooks are seldom ghost-written or vanity publications. (And the “seldom” is there because there may be examples out there. I have yet to encounter one.)

If [the author has no expertise], how has proving their credible authorship changed anything?

If you have discovered the author but they turn out not to be an expert, then you have established authorship but not credibility.

A better policy would be “automatic failure for the use of a website without providing proof of credible authorship”, but banning direct citations of Wikipedia is a good first step.

I think both of these are unnecessary and potentially counter productive.

Depending on the topic, “credible authorship” is meaningless – unless the student is trying to say something wrong on the basis that “educated person X” said it first, the exact author is not always important.

Quite often, in both printed media and on the internet, I have come across articles by people who are far from experts in the field they are writing about but are experts (or at least “famous”) in other, sometimes unrelated fields. Now, if I reference them does having proof of who actually wrote it give any extra weight to what they have said?

If it doesn’t (and I dont think it does), how has proving their credible authorship changed anything?

I will leave heather to address the brunt of the points made here, but one stands out.

Wrong. Challenging Internet sources is slightly more important, because of the issue of anonymity.

I dont agree at all. Asserting it is wrong simply because internet sources are anonymous is, simply put wrong.

In an ideal world, all sources of educational information would be heavily peer reviewed and be written by well verified authors. The fact remains, however, that lots of printed material is ghost written, vanity press garbage or worse. Giving printed material extra credibility simply because it is solid and in your hands is a massive mistake to make. For example, an entry in the printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica should not be considered 100% accurate – publisher and author bias has to be considered, let alone simple factual mistakes.

While there are problems with using the internet in general, and wiki in particular, as a source – used properly this is surely something a capable teacher should overcome. Yes, there are certainly topics which fall foul to unscrupulous or misinformed edits, there are also a lot of topics which are as factual and accurate as any other encyclopaedia. Teaching students to read and assess all their sources of information in a critical and sceptical manner is a good thing – this is achieved allowing them to use wikipedia and learn how to spot mistakes and bias, surely?

If the tutor allowed the use of Wikipedia, but put the effort in to highlight when people made mistakes as a result of using biased or inaccurate information this would teach the students a lot more than simply demanding they use printed materials to reduce the “cut and paste” effect – I mean, most people have scanners and OCR software anyway…

I meant that challengng the authority of text books was as important as challenging internet sources.

Wrong. Challenging Internet sources is slightly more important, because of the issue of anonymity.

A textbook represents at the very least the statement “we believe the things in this book to be true, and are willing to stake our reputations on it”. The Internet (and Wikipedia in particular) do not have even this level of guarantee. When it comes to informational sites, only a relative handful are not effectively anonymous. You can’t be sure that an author’s name on a website is a real name. You can’t even be sure that the registration of a DNS record contains a real name — aside from the various anonymizing systems out there, I know of at least one person who owns a domain name which returns outright false information via whois. Establishing the identity of an author is step 1 in establishing the credibility of a source, even when other routes exist, and it just can’t be done reliably on the Internet, except on sites which function more or less identically to print media, such as peer-reviewed science sites.

Wikipedia suffers from this effect more than much of the rest of the Internet. Quite aside from the anonymity of its contributors, its editors have repeatedly been caught falsifying information to a greater or lesser extent. Google “Essjay Ryan Jordan” for the most prominent instance, but there have been other troubling cases. (I’m not getting caught in the link == held for moderator trap again!) (Even founder Jimbo Wales isn’t immune from doing questionable things — Google “Jimbo birthday Wikipedia” to see the rather odd story about how he contradicted himself, then started abusing his editor privileges to make the earlier statements disappear. Admittedly, the subject of the date of his birthday is unlikely to ever have importance, but it’s worrisome that such a case would even exist.)

I know students from 2 UK universities who are told that a Wikipedia citation brings an automatic failure on a paper. … No matter how they’ve used the information. … No matter what its source…. No matter the quality of their piece. The canny ones just follow the Wiki hyperlinks to the sources and use them. There are no rules to enforce how uncritically they use these sources.

Good. This is a relatively coherent policy. (Not the “no matter how uncritically they use these sources” part; the “Wikipedia citation == automatic failure on a paper”.) Particularly if they are warned, although I would hope that anyone attending college/university would already know not to do this.

Given Wikipedia’s anonymity problems, a Wikipedia citation is almost exactly equivalent to “somebody told me at a party, and they may or may not have represented other people whose identities I don’t know”. We don’t know the someone’s name, we don’t even know what kind of party. Yes, it could have been a professional expert attending that party, who could back up their statement with all sorts of evidence if given the chance. But it could also have been a sober-looking drunk playing a joke, or a genuine crackpot, or a marketing shill planting false information to influence sales, or anything at all, really. Examining Wikipedia’s sources is the only way to establish the credibility of any of its entries in an academic context, and one of the rules of citation is that you always cite the more original source you can. Wikipedia drops out.

A better policy would be “automatic failure for the use of a website without providing proof of credible authorship”, but banning direct citations of Wikipedia is a good first step.

Thanks for the thoughtful and witty comments.

Vicar:

I didn’t mean to imply that uncritical use of internet sources was OK. I meant that challengng the authority of text books was as important as challenging internet sources.

My argument was with the professor as a representative of the common university approach that treats old media as “legit” and new media as being ” too easy.”

I know students from 2 UK universities who are told that a Wikipedia citation brings an automatic failure on a paper.

(No matter how they’ve used the information. … No matter what its source…. No matter the quality of their piece. The canny ones just follow the Wiki hyperlinks to the sources and use them. There are no rules to enforce how uncritically they use these sources. Even a student who used the Encyclopedia Britannica as their only source would not get their paper automatically marked as 0. Nor would a student who just took a set book as true authority.)

(Yeah, yeah, I know… anecdote is not evidence. )

Your say that, in Wiki, years of expertise are valued no more than a n00b’s ideas. I agree. It’s also pretty well the way our governments work now, in any case. You give the example of nonsense in Wiki that could get repeated.

However, that’s what ‘m saying really. Much formal education rewards repeating what you’ve read where it is inappropriate (as in your economics example. If the same garbage was in a book, it would still be garbage). This is anti-knowledge, whatever your sources are.

Analytical skills and scepticism don’t guarantee that you won’t be misled but, at least they leave room for correction.

Wikipedia is falsifiable. Anyone can challenge what others have written. This lets it function pretty well without much moderation.

The hyperlink I removed from your quote was: theregister.co.uk/2005/10/ 18/ wikipedia_quality_problem – very useful and thank you for pointing it out to us, but for some reason if I leave the URL intact (or try to hyperlink to it), the post displays no text. I have no idea what is doing this.

Exterminator – I have no idea why Akismet decided your comment needed to await moderation but I have now pulled it out of the moderation queue.

Generally speaking we try to keep the anti-spam measures to a minimum here, I’d rather have one or two spams get through than loads of people waiting to have their comment approved – however it seems that sometimes the software takes things into its own hands and decides who gets to comment and who has to wait. As soon as we work out what is causing this, we will try to address it.

Here’s Wiki again: Moderation is the period of time that elapses between your posting a comment and heather’s actually reading it and approving it. Occasionally, moderation will take place effectively, in which case your comment will actually appear as a comment, albeit several moments, hours, or days later. In many cases, however, comments disappear into the ether during moderation, and will suddenly reappear on completed unrelated posts at total strangers’ blogs or, even worse, as spam going to the Pentagon or MI5. Occasionally, but not often, a prolonged period of moderation can lead to a bazillion comments all containing the same bullcrap.

My print dictionary had no entries for either word. But Wikipedia was really in its glory:
Imaginary words ending in the sound “-illion”, such as zillion[1] and bazillion[2], are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large number, by analogy to names of large numbers such as billion and trillion. Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be considered large enough to be unfathomable by the average human mind. AND Bullshit (often bowdlerized to BS, or occasionally Bovine Scat), also Bullcrap, is a common English expletive. It can also be shortened to just “Bull”.

So there you have it. Take that, University Professors.