Robert Vouter's Profile

On a more philosophical note, Wikipedia is viewed as the child of our postmodern age in which “truth” is measured by how many people believe something.

Which begs the question: If Wikipedia is so bad that we caution our students not to use it for academic work, how can it be so good that much of what you need to know is found there?

easy it is to use.

peer review

On the other, we have devoted users who have embraced this tool as the crown jewel of the new digital information world.

primarily analog and that our students are largely digital.

But isn’t that just the point? Wikipedia users appear to be abandoning a world of certainty for an intangible universe made up of half-blown ideas and blatant errors. The problem is, they have not abandoned anything. They have never been part of the analog generation. Wikipedia is their world, and it has met their needs wonderfully. To tell them to use only the print encyclopedias for reference information is to make them ask, “Why should I when Wikipedia is at my fingertips?” They don’t know the analog world very well, and what they see is a law of diminishing returns—too much effort for too little benefit.

too much effort for too little benefit.

As soon as these students get out of our clutches, they’ll abandon us as old-fashioned and eccentric

article from Journal of Echocardiography

Wikipedia is also an environment for shallow thinking

the ability to evaluate information, what better place to start than with Wikipedia

A professor or information literacy instructor assigns groups of students to evaluate and edit Wikipedia articles, using research from other sources as an evaluative tool.

is here to stay

as part of legitimate scholarship for tenure

castigating it, we can use it as a tool to improve information literacy.