j’s scratchpad

Rich suggested I post this entry from Lorcan Dempsey discussing Wikipedia as a citable source and a valuable knowledgebase. Dempsey highlights its value and utility as a knowledgebase by mentioning how others use it to provide basic background on subjects. Dempsey then explains further why Middlebury College recently decided against allowing students to cite it. Sure, authority and accuracy are issues, but many professors discourage college and university students from citing any kind of encyclopedia.

The discussion about citing Wikipedia in history classes reminds me of an assignment a history professor gave his class. Although I could see how using an encyclopedia would give the students some leads on answering some of the questions in the assignment, part of the instructions stipulated the students were not allowed to use the reference books. A piece of the assignment I didn’t like is that they were also not allowed to ask for assistance from the librarians. The point of the exercise was to teach the students more about doing research on their own and about what kinds of sources existed. While it’s important for students to learn some of these skills and sources on their own, does discouraging them from asking for help from the librarians really do anyone any favors?

(I queued some posts Sunday to make blogging during this busy week easier and I still managed to forget to make on live Monday. *sighs* I can’t win, can I?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 3:03 am and is filed under Wikis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.