WHAT NEXT: Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?
By Michael J. Petrilli
Assessing the online encyclopedia’s impact on K–12 education
Mention Wikipedia within the ivy-covered walls
of the academy and you’ll find no shortage of opinions,
ranging from wildly enthusiastic to mildly apocalyptic.
That’s no surprise: the web site, available for free and
developed by an army of volunteers, raises questions that lie at
the heart of scholarship and inquiry. What is the value of
expertise? Who owns knowledge? Should we trust the “wisdom of
crowds” or fear the mob?
In the workaday world of elementary and
secondary education, however, these philosophical musings seem less
to the point. The questions are simpler: Can an online encyclopedia
that’s edited by anyone, and thus no one, be trusted as a
credible information source? Should students be encouraged to tap
this tool as a supplement to their textbooks? And is it even possible to
discourage its use?
To find out, my research intern and I performed
a simple experiment. We selected 100 terms from prominent U.S. and
world history textbooks (Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present and World History:
Connections to Today—The Modern Era). We chose a mix of items that students might be asked to
research for a test or paper, from the Mayflower Compact to the War
Powers Act, from the Protestant Reformation to Anwar Sadat. And we
entered each term into Google to find out which web sites the
ubiquitous search engine suggests as the most useful links.
The results are astounding. Google listed
Wikipedia as the number-one hit a remarkable 87 times out of 100.
The encyclopedia came in second 12 times and third once. In other
words, the Wikipedia site was listed among the top three Google hits 100 percent of
the time.
Several conclusions can be drawn from this
finding. First, people searching for information about these
historical terms are finding the entries from Wikipedia helpful;
that’s why Google is listing them so prominently. As a
result, even if students do not seek out Wikipedia, Wikipedia will
find them. Second, “banning” the use of Wikipedia
appears hopelessly naive. As Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s
co-founder, told the New York
Times, “They might as well say
don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.”
(Blocking Wikipedia isn’t so hard; some older
“child-safe” Internet filters block the entire site
because of its occasional objectionable pages.)
But are students likely to find good information
once they reach the site? We randomly selected 10 of our 100 terms and
compared the treatment given to them by Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and the textbooks themselves. The entries from Wikipedia sure are
comprehensive, or at least verbose. At more than 3,000 words, the
Wikipedia write-ups are more than twice as long, on average, as those
of Britannica,
and almost eight times as long as the passages from the textbooks.
And, to our admittedly untrained eyes, the
information from Wikipedia appeared just as reliable. (A 2006 Nature article
found roughly the same number of errors in entries from the two
encyclopedias on various scientific topics, so our
“findings” are consistent.) We certainly didn’t
notice any discrepancies. (See below for a list of the ten terms if you’d
like to test them yourself.)
The reason the content is relatively reliable
is probably because these terms are fairly mainstream. “The
high-traffic areas are going to be the cleanest,” Wiki expert
Alexander M. C. Halavais told the Chronicle
of Higher Education. Thus high-school
level content is likely to be less error-prone than arcane subjects
studied in graduate school.
As a K–12 educational tool, then,
Wikipedia appears to pass the test, at least to the limited degree
that any encyclopedia assists the learning process. Still, that
doesn’t mean the site is perfect. As a resource about
hot-button political issues, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to
manipulation and spin. This is apparent in its treatment of
education policy issues.
For example, its entry on “school
voucher” (which comes up first on Google) gives twice as much
ink to opponents as supporters. Furthermore, it includes spurious
and unsupported claims such as this: “Opponents also claim
that the vouchers are tantamount to providing taxpayer-subsidized
‘white flight’ from urban public schools.” (The
vast majority of students receiving taxpayer-subsidized vouchers in
Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia are, of course,
nonwhite.)
So here’s a rule of thumb: When
elementary and secondary students are researching history,
Wikipedia is a decent place to start. When they or others are
researching education policy, though, tapping another resource is
in order. May I suggest educationnext.org?
The Ten Terms
World History |
U.S. History |
- Frederick the Great
- Otto von Bismarck
- Panama Canal
- Konrad Adenauer
- Taliban
|
- Fourteenth Amendment
- Roosevelt Corollary
- Dust Bowl
- Taft-Hartley Act
- War Powers Act
|
|