​Does anyone remember the Encyclopedia Britannica?

By Chuck Solly

rcsolly@gmail.com

I sure do. I used several of their volumes to flatten out things like my wrinkled 8th grade book report...I got a "C" on it anyway. I didn't mean to take you back to the dark ages -- the Encyclopedia Britannica is still a reference on the internet.

The other encyclopedia on the internet is Wikipedia. It is built on a wiki platform which means that anyone can edit it at any time.

Since this is back-to-school week, I thought I would give you a little heads up using (or not using) the Wikipedia web site.

Most college freshmen learn on Day 1 that they shouldn’t use Wikipedia. It’s framed as a crime on par with cheating: a mortal sin against the gods of academia.

In hundreds of classrooms across the country, though, some professors have begun taking a very different tack. Not only are their students encouraged to see Wikipedia as an important information source, but they’re required to edit it for class assignments. more than 14,000 students have created or edited 35,000 Wikipedia articles as part of a program run by the Wiki Education Foundation.

The three-year-old nonprofit, a spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation funded in part by the Stanton Foundation and Google, is determined to convince professors and students that —counter to everything they have ever been told — Wikipedia actually belongs in schools. The organization takes care of training students on Wikipedia’s obtuse cultural norms and retro editing interface. After that, it works with professors to oversee students as they draft, edit and submit articles, often over several weeks.

Wiki Ed is working on a special project this year: Since last fall, the program has been focused on science, math and engineering, areas in which coverage tends to be spotty. During the spring term alone, Wiki Ed estimates student edits have been seen by an audience in the 58-million range. The current summer term includes classes on everything from “advanced writing in the technical professions” to “conservation field biology.”

Wiki Ed goes a long way toward writing and researching on any number of subjects but lest you are lulled into thinking that your vast knowledge of wallpaper hanging will get you published on Wikipedia, keep this in mind: someone probably has gotten there first and has more citations than you. The editors at Wikipedia are VERY good at their jobs and run a very tight ship. But, don't cite Wikipedia. You never know who has edited what, and when, so just avoid doing this altogether.

Learn the phraseology first. Check out these terms: crowd-sourced, open source, wiki, citation, plagiarism, information/Web/online literacy.

Know your source. Just because you’ve left Wikipedia doesn’t mean that you can blindly trust a new source. Wikipedia editors have been known to link to some pretty dodgy sites.

Get to the Library. Libraries have subscriptions to sites that are paywalled. That is to say you must pay to see the information you are interested in. Many times the library subscription gets you through.

Use the footnotes. Wikipedia footnotes are not found on every entry; they do, however, appear on most academic entries. The footnotes operate like citations—a hyperlinked notation on the page directs the user to an original source. Footnotes tend to be more reliable than regular Wikipedia citations, but a discerning eye is still required before settling on a source.

Wikipedia, as of this writing has over 5 million articles and the editors say that many articles need improvement. So if research is your thing, you have an opportunity here. Just remember that not everything you read on the Internet is the truth.