Why do teachers and professors hate Wikipedia? If you have school-age children you have seen the instruction printed in bold on countless homework assignments: Don’t use Wikipedia.
I get it. I understand what they are trying to do. But considering what Wikipedia has done to the business of knowledge, saying the above is tantamount to telling students not to use Google.
Have you every searched for anything online? Do you know why Wikipedia is near the top of the page for almost any subject? Because it represents the most consistently searched, easy-to-read-get-the-info-you-need-to-know site on the web. And that seems to be the problem.
On the subjects most high school students study, Wikipedia is a fast, reliable go-to. It is easy. Only a few specialties in college are Wikiproof and even those are represented. So why tell students not to use Wikipedia? Do teachers know something that the rest of the world doesn’t? Do they know more than the 75,000 Wikipedia contributors worldwide? Possibly. I would be willing to bet, however, that a large portion of Wikipedia is written, policed and fact-checked by professors and teachers. In 2008, 684 million visitors looked through more then 10 million articles in more than 260 languages.
Admitted, because so many people can contribute, some information may have errors. But by its nature, Wikipedia is a constantly evolving and self-correcting organism. The older, more established articles are as accurate as any textbook and more so in many cases. Many textbooks are filled with 7 year-old, outdated information. Do you really think that the Wikipedia article about Thomas Jefferson hasn’t been poured over by thousands of historians? Unlikely.
This is what Wikipedia says about its content: “As a wiki, articles are never complete. They are continually edited and improved over time. In general, this results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a fair and balanced representation of information.”
Is it odd that teachers, of all people, hate Wikipedia, especially since it is, in essence, like a human brain, constantly learning and improving? Especially when textbooks are in many respects, like human brains that went into a coma 10 years ago.
Wikipedia is not perfect. Schools and teachers are not perfect. Look at what the flow of real-time news both on TV and online has done to newspapers. By the time a newspaper hits your driveway, TV and the web is 24 hours ahead of it. What I’m saying is, there is a place in learning for both forms. Ignoring advances in human knowledge should hardly be called education.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so rigid in our defense of out of date knowledge and our disdain for the way things will be once are out of school. Could it be that our distain should be reserved for a book that cost $75 and dispenses information that was old before it hit the desk?