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Mark Bauerlein's post at the Chronicle of Higher Education Brainstorm blog frets about "the Wikipedia syndrome." It seems to me like the same old stuff. He describes a study by Mike Petrilli in Education Next:
It starts with an experiment, and the results are worth noting. Petrilli collected 100 items from U.S. and world history textbooks, things such as the Mayflower Compact, the Protestant Reformation, and Anwar Sadat. He then did what students do when assigned those terms as research topics. He typed them into Google...Eighty-seven times out of 100, the Wikipedia entry for the term came up first. Twelve times it came up second, and once third. “In other words, the Wikipedia site was listed among the top three Google hits 100 percent of the time.”
For Bauerlein, "this is bad." It's bad because students will likely take the easy route:
"In doing research, students don’t consult enough sources. Wikipedia is so easy and accessible that it stands out from all other reference works. Thirty years ago, students might check several encyclopedias, look up Cliff Notes, pore through the stacks for background texts, etc. Now, it’s Wikipedia first and, too often, last. The percentage of Google searches that go to the second results page, so I’ve heard, is less than one."
Here's a thought: teach your students better research skills. If your students are only using Wikipedia, it's your fault.
Here's another thought: practice what your preach. What is up with this statement?
"The percentage of Google searches that go to the second results page, so I’ve heard, is less than one."
Who has Bauerlein "heard" this from? How difficult would it be to research this fact that he once heard? I wonder if he read it on Wikipedia. I wonder if Bauerlein has the Wikipedia syndrome. I wonder if there's a cure...
"Here's a thought: teach your students better research skills."
The irony is that you can use wikipedia to do precisely this.
"Here's a thought: teach your students better research skills. If your students are only using Wikipedia, it's your fault." Amen to that!
Interesting blog post, I liked it.
Good job.
My name is Jim Brown. I'm a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Texas, specializing in Digital Literacies and Literatures. I maintain four blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings by viewing this RSS feed. The name of this blog is explained in this post from January 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Assume that a definable group of students will start -- and maybe end -- their research with Wikipedia. This will make the educator's task of grading easier, since it will be clear that the student plagiarized, and did so by leaving the following obvious tells:
* The student simply cut-n-pasted from a Wikipedia article, leaving all sorts of odd artifacts: hypertext links, odd formatting, and -- if they copied the source code -- distinctive Wikimarkup tags.
* The student cut-n-pasted from a Wikipedia article, removed all tell-tale formating, yet did look at the text any further. There is always the chance of the grader encountering a non-sequitor in the text, such as the word "penus" in mid-sentence, or "This is a very boring article" at the end of a paragraph.
* The student cut-n-pasted from a Wikipedia article, removed all tell-tale formating, and made the effort to proof-read the article. There is always the tell-tale structure of a Wikipedia article: lead paragraph, distinctive traces of an old edit-war, unusual emphasis on certain minor details while ignoring major themes.
* The student cut-n-pasted from a Wikipedia article, removed all tell-tale formating, made the effort to proof-read the article, and actually rewrote parts of it to make it a cohesive essay. Well, you've just encountered someone who is teachable. Leave a "please see me after class" note at the bottom of the essay, & in the ensuing private conference explain why plagiarism is a bad thing, then offer the student a second chance. Maybe they'll start down that road to independent thought.
Geoff