My students were familiar with Wikipedia; however, the only thing I knew about it was anyone could make an entry or change information that was already there. I told my students they could not take everything they read on Wikipedia as factual.
I typed in Harley Davidson and was led to the history of the HD motorcycle. I wasn't that knowledgeable about the topic so I wouldn't know if the information was accurate. There were several citations made in the article so I guess the info could be easily checked out.
Then I went to the discussion page and discovered others had issues with some of the material. There was an entry discussing the status of the HD article in regards to Good Article status. The HD article had fallen out of favor in its ranking as a "good article." I skimmed down and most of the problem was with citing of information. When I went to the "editing" page I didn't quite understand if the edits had been made or if this was the page I could edit. I clicked on some of the edits and didn't get it. The "history" button actually took me to where people had made the edits.
There are a lot of people out there that know or think they know about different subjects. I guess I will keep verifying any information through a variety of sources.
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While working on my degree, I had several teachers tell me not to quote "Wikipedia." That made you search for information in different websites.
ReplyDeleteYou're exactly right about verifying information and that's what we need to teach our students to do as well. We have to get them to be much more critical and skeptical of the majority of information that they find out on the free web.
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