Educational Issues: Wikis and Education

Online wikis, such as Wikipedia, ahve grown in popularity. The provide ease of access to a variety of subjects and are becoming better every day. However, many teachers doubt their credibility due to the fact that anyone can edit articles, often anonymously. Wiki sites are working to improve their credibility by requiring editors to use thier real names, even though anyone will still be able to edit the articles. I do not believe that students should be able to cite wiki sites as credible sources because the author of any type of liturature i bound to have some bias no matter how scholarly they are. When the identity of the author id removed frome the euqation i becomes almost impossible to understand their purpose for writing what they did, and so a great portion of the value of the entry is lost. However, I do believe that students should definitely use wiki sites as a way of gather ing imformation, just not for thier cited information. at the bottom of most Wikipedia articles there are several works cited. The reader is often given a large list of credible sources that they can use that will provide the same information in most cases, since Wikipedia has a lot of artilces that were jsut copied and pasted from the sources that are cited. It is a very helpful to have a list of avaliable sources that have the specific information that the student is looking for. So while the actual information included in the artilces may not be creadible and is therefore unsuitalbe for citation, wiki sites can still be used as useful research tools.