Why Students Should be Allowed to Cite Wikipedia as a Source by Betsy Woods

The term “sea change” can be used to describe a great shift in thinking.  I like it better than the over-used term “paradigm shift” because it comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (at least according to Wikipedia's entry).  As a high school English teacher, I may have just offended some of my colleagues here and at other schools.  I have a feeling there are quite a few in our field who are put off by referring to both Shakespeare and Wikipedia in the same sentence.  But ignoring the importance and relevance of Wikipedia is akin to ignoring a revolution that is no longer knocking at the door, but is in your living room, sitting on your sofa, drinking your Diet Coke.  There’s a word that describes the teacher who with a firm edict declares that no student be permitted to use Wikipedia as a source:  hypocrite.  Everyone uses Wikipedia.  Really. Whether it is to quickly look up who uttered the famous quote about climbing Mt. Everest “Because it’s there” (not Sir Edmund Hillary, by the way) or to double-check the spelling of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, teachers use Wikipedia, so why shouldn’t students?  

The all-too-easy counter argument is that any fool can edit Wikipedia and therefore Wikipedia is not credible. The simplicity of this argument, however, belies its sincerity.  Just because the way we collect and disseminate information is changing, is no reason to dismiss the whole of the information out of hand. Evaluating the credibility of sources is one of the most important skills our students need for the 21^st Century, and the hard truth is it’s not a black and white issue.  In fact, evaluating sources is time consuming and difficult—for students and for teachers.  Perhaps it is this difficulty that causes some teachers to outlaw Wikipedia.  But the old days of combing through yellowed literary journals and the (mercifully brief) era of manipulating microfiche transparencies on a machine in the back corner of the library have come to an end.  Information is now easy to find—and in the wonderful way of inverse equations—harder to winnow.