Re:School vs. Wikipedia
by roywiggins on Friday October 07, 2022 @01:25PM
(#33124351)
Sure, if you give them access to a better encyclopedia, that's not a terrible idea, I just think it's silly to have an absolute ban- "read at least two different encyclopedias" instead, maybe? "Cite N secondary sources you didn't find on Wikipedia"? And then they can find out for themselves how good quality wikipedia is.
The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).