Lesson 6: General and Specialized Encyclopedias

Again, I am in a position where I have very little to offer in terms of my opinion about established vs. free citizen-built encyclopedias such as Wikipedia as this course has provided me with my first introduction to Wikipedia.
Having followed the discussions among my “classmates”, my understanding has increased a hundred-fold. For starters, I had absolutely no idea that Wikipedia was a citizen-built encyclopedia. I just assumed (falsely) that it was a reliable, unbiased online reference source.
Having now spent some time navigating the site, I agree with many of my “classmates” that this would be a good starting point for research and an amazing opportunity to teach my students information literacy skills such as authority, viewpoint and objectivity. The added bonus as a teacher-librarian is that it is absolutely free! As Frances R-C. stated in the discussion, “By simply ignoring the usage of Wikipedia, or worse yet, forbidding it, what have we really taught our students about evaluating and accessing authoritative information?”
I also feel it imperative that we teach our students that it is critical that we check our research information with other sources. By starting our research with Wikipedia, we have an opportunity to do just that. As Megan M. stated, “Because it is free, and easily accessible and written in a user friendly style that students can use simply, it might be a good starting point. I think if students were allowed to use this as one of several resources required it would not be detrimental. In fact teaching them to look for discrepancies and question the authority of sources are great critical literacy skills to possess. Identifying inaccuracies would be a great lesson learned.”
I was pleased to read in Berinstein’s article that biased information is simply removed from the wikis: “The wiki process, in and of itself, is something of a mutually assured destruction-type of process. In other words, if you write something that's biased, it'll just be deleted. And so everybody who participates has an incentive to try to write for the enemy, as we put it, or write for people who may not agree with you and try to phrase things in a way that's as neutral as you possibly can because that's the only way to write something that will survive the test of time.” (Berinstein, P., 2006) There is some standard for accountability.
There is no point in prohibiting our students from using Wikipedia. As Harris states in his article: “So many media specialists have banned using the site. There are two problems with this. For one, study after study has found that Wikipedia is, in fact, reasonably accurate as a general knowledge source. And students are just going to use it anyway. My May 2006 column for SLJ "MySpace Can Be Our Space" (p. 30) explored the futility of attempting to ban a wildly popular Web site. Even if you filter Wikipedia and its typically prominent results on Google, students will just use it at home.” (Harris, C., 2007)
I will conclude with Jody W.’s discussion response: “The role of the teacher librarian is quickly evolving with the rapid changes of web-based information. We have to keep with the times and provide our students with skills to work with the newest internet information resources or web-based tools. This is the world they live in, WE live in, and it is our role to prepare our students for the future. If we buck at Wikipedia, it won't be long before we are left entirely behind.”
References
Berinstein, P. (2006). Wikipedia and Britannica: The Kid's All Right (And So's the Old Man) Searcher 14(3), 16-26.
Harris, C. (2007). Can we make peace with Wikipedia? School Library Journal, 53(6), 26.