Thoughts on Wikipedia

In one of my doctoral courses, a classmate posted concerns about Wikipedia being accepted as a source for college papers. Here is my response:

Reliability of a source is a difficult concept for me to grasp. By whose standards? A panel of academics? What about all of the experience and insight out in the real world? Do we just ignore it? In my world, veterinarians, attorneys, and a handful of nutritionists are the only ones with terminal degrees, and many of them are students of horsemen who barely finished high school. Knowledge is everywhere. This is part of the concept of connectivism.

As for Wikipedia, it is subject to market forces. If it does not present reliable information, it dies. For me, this actually gives it more credibility than something written by an academic who is protected by tenure. And what about all the lip service given to the notion of collaborative learning? Wikipedia offers the best of what collaboration has to offer with enough oversight to be sure that bad information doesn't get passed on. Yes, anyone can post anything on Wikipedia, but as I pointed out earlier, it will be quickly removed if it doesn't meet guidelines. Personally I've never found anything incorrect, misleading, or biased on Wikipedia. So what's the beef? Yes, it's a new model, but shouldn't we be open to new ideas?

Finally, I think accessibility of information is also important. On our last assignment, I wanted to add something about survey response bias to my paper. Within ten seconds, I found a comprehensive and very well written article on Wikipedia. I also found some great material on blogs and web sites. So I quickly connected to what I needed to know but I still had to find an "acceptable" source to use in the paper. I spent another half hour trying to find something useful in our academic data bases. I am pretty handy with search engines and it was still extremely frustrating. I finally found one source I could use.

As a teacher, I want to excite students about knowledge and how to access it, not frustrate them. We are in changing times. Maybe we need to rethink what constitutes acceptable sources.