Uses of Wikipedia

Teaching Wikipedia last week proved to be something of a revelation to me.  As I read  ‘Wikipedia: Representations of Knowledge’, chapter 5 from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, I learned about aspects of the online encyclopaedia that I had never considered before.

As a tutor and occasional lecturer I have always tended to dissuade students from using Wikipedia in their assignments.  I’ve explained this stance on several grounds.  Principally I have relied on the consensus that existed amongst many academics, when Wikipedia first emerged, that because anyone could edit any entry, then the information was not reliable.  Another reason I have cited to students is that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and at university it is not an appropriate source.  Here I’ve compared Wikipedia to World Book or Encyclopaedia Britannica suggesting that it would seem strange to quote these in a tertiary level assignment.  Even when I began to use Wikipedia regularly–for blogging purposes–and saw that it was a useful site to link to for a plain English explanation on any topic where I couldn’t be sure of my readers’ existing knowledge, I still wouldn’t recommend its use to students. In this instance it was a case of not opening the floodgates; even suggesting that Wikipedia might be a starting point would ensure that many students did not research beyond it.

Source: The Age, 24 Aug 2007

After reading about Wikipedia: its creation; as an example of ‘produsage; the efforts at quality control and disruption; the criticisms directed towards it; and the importance of educating its users, I remain unmoved in my conviction that it shouldn’t be cited at a tertiary level.  My stance, however,  should not be interpreted simply as a case of a hide-bound academic refusing to embrace grass-roots systems of knowledge. Indeed, one of the things that I most like about Wikipedia is that it is a user-led phenomenon; there is something empowering in the thought that a keen television fan can create an entry for his or her favourite TV show and identify it as significant in a particular context, according to values which are different to those of the Logies’ judges.

My reflections about Wikipedia over the last week have, rather, served to clarifiy in my mind the scope and purpose of Wikipedia. Now I won’t explain my advice not to use Wikipedia for tertiary level work by saying that because anyone can edit any entry it is therefore not reliable.  I appreciate that Wikipedia is not a rules-free zone and that there are policies and protocols in place to weed out misinformation. Now I will advise students not to quote Wikipedia in a tertiary setting simply because its claims to providing knowledge are far more modest than many users ask of it. While its  discussion pages may document wars over the representation of various details and perspectives on any given entry, as a source, Wikipedia seeks to offer no more than a generalist level of information.  It is this clear statement, supported by Wikipedia‘s  No Original Research Policy, which prohibits the inclusion of self-published or original research that has crystalised my reasoning on why students shouldn’t quote from Wikipedia in assignments: at this level students are expected to conduct independent research using specialist and original sources to create their own arguments. Wikipedia simply does not aspire to be either specialist or original.

Take Two

Has it been almost a week since last week’s tutorial?  How did that happen?  Obviously I meant to set a much better example for everyone and blog here earlier than the night before this week’s tute.  Luckily I made some quick notes just after the class last week, so I have some recollection of what I wanted to say as a follow up to the discussion.

For the benefit of people who couldn’t make it to last week’s tutorial, I wanted to repeat my clarification of the advice about referencing for the second assignment.  Initially, I advised that everyone should include a list of references in the QUT Harvard style at the end of each blog post.  After a discussion with the other tutor, Rosanna, we figured out that it wasn’t necessary for everyone to be so formal about referencing–at least on the blogs.  However, when everyone compiles their best three blog posts for submission in the writing template provided, that will be the place to provide a list of references in the QUT Harvard style.

As many students pointed out, it did seem a bit unusual to have to include a list of references at the end of a blog post. There are, of course, other ways to acknowledge someone else’s work that you might use to inform your blog posts, such as links, for example. Another solution to the question of references is one provided by KL Fair, a student in my 11.30 Wednesday tutorial.  KL created a page on her blog  just for references.  I thought this was an ingenious solution to a problem she identified: a conflict between her perception of the blog as a particular form and what she had been instructed to do in class.  Personally, I have no objection to anyone  questioning any instruction, especially when such a creative solution is found as a result.

KL’s blog is just one of the first blogs that students from  KCB201 will be creating and posting to over the next few weeks. Last week I sent around an email asking everyone in my class to send me the URL of their blogs as they became confident enough to share their work with the rest of the class and, potentially, the world.  I created my own extra page titled ‘Blog Roll‘, so that as everyone sends me their URL I’ll add them to the list and everyone can look up one another’s blog and subscribe to their RSS feeds via the Google Reader accounts we set up a couple of weeks ago.  If you’re still a bit shy about publishing your thoughts online, having a look at your classmates blogs is one way to become more comfortable with the whole exercise;  it always helps to see what someone else has done.

I’m getting close to 500 words now and I haven’t even said anything about Citizen Journalism, which was the subject of both of the readings we discussed in the tutorial: Chapter 4 from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond and Chapter 8 from the 3rd edition of  New Media.  I really only have space to say that I thought both chapters built upon the idea of produsage and allowed for a discussion of a ‘real world’ instance of that theory at work.

Hello KCB201!

I started this blog today as I fumbled my way through introducing my KCB201 tutorials to their second piece of assessment.  They have to create a series of five blog entries that discuss the unit themes the course is considering in the second half of this semester. The idea, as I understand it at the moment,  is that they write 500 words each week for five weeks and apply their understanding of the weekly unit theme to an aspect of their professional interest as they define it.

There was good attendance today for the first week back after the break, so most people have signed up to WordPress and set up a basic blog.   It seems to be all very straightforward, but I can see already that there are lots of options in WordPress for editing the appearance of the blog, as well as various widgets that can be implemented depending on your preferences.   This is quite a bit to take on board for those students who’ve never blogged before.  I’m almost certain that we barely scratched the surface of these features today.

One good thing for those people who are on a steeper learning curve than others is that there’s plenty of time to experiment with the appearance of the blog.  While it’s a good idea to write the content of the weekly posts in a consistent manner, there will be plenty of opportunity to tinker with the appearance and settings, to add links and insert media, to make comments and ask questions, before I’ll be looking at the blogs with my marker’s hat on.

This week the unit theme was ‘produsage’ the term coined by Axel Bruns to describe, among other things, the mode in which we participate in new media.  In my tutorial classes we stumbled across the website Produsage.org which appears to be a supplementary site for the second textbook we’re using in this course, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage.  I was glad to discover this site because it helped overcome some of the difficulties of access to the textbook that some students are having by allowing us to discuss the concepts in an informed manner (after a bit of reading in class).

I also noticed that Axel has a blog aligned to this site which is specifically about produsage.  I’m having trouble loading it at the moment but as soon as it’s available I’ll be adding it as the first link in my blogroll.