Steve Ransom's List: Wikipedia

• Wikipedia's objective is to become a compendium of published knowledge about notable subjects.
• Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
• It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information
• Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.
• If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
• keeps a full history of every change to every article
• It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research.
• Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.
• The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.
• Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.

9 more annotations...

• "The goal here is not to take Wikipedia as gospel but to use it to focus your research (via links, keywords and references) and get a little context (via background information). Focusing cuts down the time you spend on the project while context will get you a better grade for your effort."

• Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.
• That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has also discouraged college students in the past from quoting or citing Wikipedia in academic papers. His remarks say that he gets about 10 emails a week from students who say – "I got a grade F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia and the information turned out to be wrong".
• admits that the encyclopedia website lacks "the authority to be used as a citeable source for college-aged and university students."

• 76 percent of teachers “strongly agree" that search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily (and “equate research with Googling,” they say), while 71 percent agree that digital technologies "discourage students from finding and using a wide range of sources for their research."
• Yet 87 percent of the teachers surveyed use Wikipedia, compared with 53 percent of U.S. adult Internet users. More than 80 percent of the teachers surveyed say they use the Internet tool to gather material to help them create lesson plans or find content that will engage their students. And virtually all of the teachers surveyed (99 percent) say they use search engines to find information online.