Wikipedia can be a valuable resource for projects and papers as long as librarians and students use a critical mind while reading articles. When searching for general information or ideas, researchers can look to Wikipedia for brief explanations. However, researchers should take their search a step further and continue looking for further information from more authoritative sources. Wikipedia is a useful tool to receive a survey of many subjects. Once a researcher has a clear idea of what they want to study, they can focus their search and look for more reliable sources, including academic articles, videos, and infographics.
Wikipedia becomes even more useful in the library when patrons familiarize themselves with materials that explain how to get the most out of the website. One exercise to help students understand Wikipedia is to have them write their own Wikipedia article, as described in “Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool” (Wikimedia Foundation, 2013). This assignment allows students to practice researching while also better understanding the format and necessary components of an encyclopedia article. They may uncover new insights into how their favorite Wikipedia articles are written and may also discover that some articles they believed to be accurate and reliable are actually biased or unreliable.
Additionally, Wikipedia articles usually tend to show up first when using search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Google even pulls answers from Wikipedia to answer specific questions. These answers are then displayed above the web results on Google. Wikipedia cannot be ignored by students and, therefore, should not be ignored by teachers or librarians. Librarians should address the fact that Wikipedia is most likely the first result a student will find when looking through suggestions from Google. Jennings (2008) writes, “Since students are already using Wikipedia, librarians need to be familiar with this resource and should try to leverage it to teach information literacy skills”(p. 433). Wikipedia workshops focused on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of specific Wikipedia articles would help student researchers to find useful and accurate information when writing a paper or working on a project.
Information literacy and media literacy is becoming more and more important in a time when our most powerful leaders falsify information. If critical literacy skills such as those described in this week’s readings were thrust upon the leaders of today, perhaps we would not receive inaccurate reports from politicians or skewed, biased stories that play upon a polarized political climate. While I cannot promise that teaching media literacy through Wikipedia articles will result in an honest world leader, I can argue for the change it will bring about in our everyday discussions both inside and outside of the classroom.
References
Jennings, E. (2008). Using Wikipedia to teach information literacy. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 15(4), 432-437
Wikimedia Foundation (2013). How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool.