Embracing the World of Wikipedia
Figuring out what to do with Wikipedia is part of a larger question: When is academia going to acknowledge the elephant in the room? Over the past decade, the web has become the primary informational environment for the average student. This is where our students live. Wrenching them out of it in the name of academic quality is simply not going to work.
But the genius of the web is that it is a means, not an end. The same medium that brings us Wikipedia also brings us e-reference and ejournals. Thus we have an opportunity to introduce Wikipedia devotees to three undiscovered realities:
1. Truth to tell, much of Wikipedia is simply amazing in its detail, currency, and accuracy. Denying this is tantamount to taking ourselves out of the new digital reality. But we need to help our students see that Wikipedia is also an environment for shallow thinking, debates over interpretation, and the settling of scores. Wikipedia itself advises that its users consult other sources to verify the information they are finding. If a key element in information literacy is the ability to evaluate information, what better place to start than with Wikipedia? We can help students to distinguish the trite from the brilliant and encourage them to check their Wikipedia information against other sources.
2. We need to introduce students to digital resources that are, in many cases, stronger than Wikipedia. Some of these are freely available online, like the amazing Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu). Others may be commercial e-reference sources with no barrier except a user name and password.
3. The most daring solution would be for academia to enter the world of Wikipedia directly. Rather than throwing rocks at it, the academy has a unique opportunity to engage Wikipedia in a way that marries the digital generation with the academic enterprise. How about these options:
• A professor writes or rewrites Wikipedia articles, learning the system and improving the product.
• A professor takes his or her class through a key Wikipedia article on a topic related to the course, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses, editing it to be a better reflection of reality.
• 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.
• A course takes on specific Wikipedia topics as heritage articles. The first group of students creates the articles and successive groups update and expand on them. In this way, collections of key “professor approved” articles can be produced in many subject areas, making Wikipedia better and better as time goes on.
If you want to see further options, Wikipedia itself provides examples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects).
What to Do with Wikipedia
When academia finally recognizes that Wikipedia is here to stay and that we can either fight it or improve it, we may finally discover that professors and students have come to a meeting of minds. This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia articles will now be fully acceptable in research paper bibliographies. But surely there is a middle ground that connects instruction on evaluation with judicious use of Wikipedia information.
Ultimately, the academy has to stop fighting Wikipedia and work to make it better. Academic administrators need to find ways to recognize Wikipedia writing as part of legitimate scholarship for tenure, promotion, and research points. When professors are writing the articles or guiding their students in article production and revision, we may become much less paranoid about this wildly popular resource. Rather than castigating it, we can use it as a tool to improve information literacy.
Robyn Jay on 14 Jul 08A since deceased, highly-regarded fellow faculty member, Anthony (Tony) Athos, occasionally sat on a bench on a nice day at the Harvard Business School, apparently staring off into space. When asked what he was doing, ever the iconoclast, he would say, "Nothing." His colleagues, trained to admire and teach action, would walk away shaking their heads and asking each other, "Is he alright?" It is perhaps no coincidence that Tony often came up with some of the most profound insights at faculty meetings and informal gatherings. This story captures much of the sense of the responses to this month's question about why managers don't think deeply. The list of causes was much longer than the list of proposed responses. But in the process, some other questions were posed. Ben Kirk kicked off the list of reasons for the phenomenon when he commented, "… what rises to the top levels are very productive and very diligent individuals who tend not to … reflect and are extremely efficient at deploying other people's ideas," implying that this type of leader is not likely to understand, encourage, or recognize deep thinking in others. Adnan Younis added the possibility that "… managers are not trained for it." Dianne Jacobs cited the possibility that persisting assumptions borne out of success serve as "roadblocks to act on needed change" (proposed by those who engage in deep thinking?). Ulysses U. Pardey, whose comment triggered my recollection of Tony Athos, wrote that "Time-for-thinking is a special moment which can be resource consuming and an unsafe activity …" (Fortunately, Athos held a tenured position in an academic organization.) A number of comments alluded to the triumph of bureaucracies and large organizations over deep thinking. As Lorre Zuppan said, "I think Jeff Immelt's efforts to protect deep thinking reflect a nice sentiment but … If his team could carry the ball, would he need to announce that he's protecting it?" Tom Henkel was more succinct: "Ther
