Reliable Sources
Start by asking students:
Has anyone ever told you to be cautious about using Wikipedia?
What reasons did they give?
Do you use it anyway?
Explain to students that there are reasons why teachers are reluctant to let students use Wikipedia as a source: it’s hard to judge if an article is reliable, since each article has many authors and may have been altered any number of times by people who may or may not be experts in the topic.
Students may be familiar with other wikis that work the same way, like Bulbapedia (which is all about Pokémon) and Wookiepedia (all about Star Wars.)
But that doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is a generally unreliable source. Instead, it means that you need to do a bit of work to make sure that any article you’re going to use is reliable.
- Accurate: the information it gives you is correct.
- Complete: it gives you a full picture of the subject, not just one part or one side of the story.
- Transparent: it’s not trying to convince you of a point of view (or if it is, it’s open about it).
- Trustworthy: you can expect the above to be true for each article and each time you use it.
Note that these indicate whether a source of general information is reliable. You will want to ask extra questions about a source of expert information. These are covered in the Verifying Information Online lesson.
Have students use the Information Wall to analyze how these apply to Wikipedia, then take up the answers:
Accuracy: Researchers have found that on average, Wikipedia is about as reliable as most other encyclopedias – but because each Wikipedia article is written and edited by different people, we have to judge the accuracy separately.
Completness: Each Wikipedia article is given a rating, which is based partly on accuracy and partly on completeness.
You can see the rating on the Talk page (click on the “Talk” tab at the top of the page).
Transparency: Wikipedia may be the most transparent information source: by clicking on View History, you can see every change that’s ever been made to an article.
View history will also show you if an article has been locked because of disagreements between editors or mailicious edits.
You can also see discussions between editors on the Talk page, which is where we saw the article’s rating earlier. A good Wikipedia article reflects the consensus between the editors who have worked on an article. If there is a debate going on about any part of the article, it’ll be here.
Trustworthiness: While Wikipedia is a very transparent source, it is not always trustworthy because anyone can edit it. That means that an article might be reliable one time you visit it and not the next – or the other way around.
Wikipedia has put a lot of work into addressing that issue: besides its human editors, there are also bots that watch for malicious edits and fix them. Between the two of them they catch most cases of vandalism pretty quickly. For example, when the Wikipedia article on house hippos was edited to make it say they were real, it was changed back just two minutes later.