Reasons Why I Love Wikipedia
1. It's free
2. It's fast
3. It's a great starting point
4. I can easily gather basic information on almost any topic
5. It's almost always in the top 5 search results
6. It is dynamic
7. References are needed to support entries
8. Open and Transparent
9. Information is interconnected.
10. Social Capital and Collective Intelligence in action
When Reading a Wikipedia Entry Always....
- Be critical of what you read
- View the contents of the Discussion tab
- Examine the article's History tab
- Compare the contents with what you know and what other sources say
Another Choice for finding out who is changing entries.....
See Who's Editing Wikipedia from Wired Magazine
INFORMATION YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WIKIPEDIA
Five Pillars of Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
Wikipedia:Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:10_things_you_did_not_know_about_Wikipedia
What Wikipedia Is NOT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOT
Featured Content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_content
Community Portal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal
Don't Believe Everything You Read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tip_of_the_day/April_1%2C_2006
Researching with Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia
How Reliable is Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tip_of_the_day/August_21%2C_2006
How to Edit a Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page
Wikipedia content criteria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_content_criteria
Alternatives to Wikipedia
Citizendium
Encarta
Britannica Online
Wikipedia 1.0
Why Not....?
1. Start with Wikipedia
2. Edit or Contribute to Wikipedia
3. Begin a Wikipedia entry
4. Try to disprove Wikipeida
Lesson Ideas for Using Wikipdedia
WikiCriticalThink.ppt
Hold a mock trial with Wikipedia as the defendant.
- Determine the "crime" first by having the group generate a list of reasons why Wikipedia might be on trial.
- Students play the roles of prosecutors, defense attorneys, jury members, witnesses, and the judge.
- Depending on the role played, each student would have a different mental process to work through.
- Resources:
Create an evaluation tool for examining the quality of a Wikipedia entry.
- The big question: What makes an entry a "quality" entry?
- Can the students locate existing tools that will help them?
- Each small group/individual student creates a preliminary tool, then come together as a whole team to merge the best ideas together to create one ideal tool that can be used by the class/group for the rest of the year.
Watch the Presidential race through the candidates' pages.
- How often do the pages change?
- Do the changes reflect current events?
- What ethical responsibilities are involved?
- This could be a great exercise in social studies, political science, current events, critical literacy, math (charting changes), etc.
- Compare wiki page to candidate's official page (Prof. Hickey)
Hold a Socratic seminar with Wikipedia as the "text."
- The students take ownership in Socratic discussion, where the teacher poses thoughtful questions and then takes the role of observer, occasionally stepping in to redirect, pose a new question, or remind the discussants of the rules of conversation.
- Possible questions include:
- How is Wikipedia an example of Collective Knowledge?
- What qualifies a person as an "expert" - in Wikipedia and in life?
- What hidden purposes might there be for putting information in Wikipedia? Are they ethical?
Determine if categories of knowledge are complete.
- Select a content area and go to the main page for that main domain, called a portal. Look at the section on Categories. Look at the levels within the Categories. Often the super ordinate categories may be complete with all of the branches of knowledge within that domain, but then the subordinate categories are lacking or include miniscule items which should belong to a lower level of hierarchy.
- Tools to help organize thinking:
- Text book table of contents
- Encyclopedia Propaedia
Write an article for a topic that is missing.
- Great for content studies!
- Use the stub guide for ideas on what information needs expansion.
- Use The Perfect Article guidelines for writing.
- The student becomes a contributor to the community at large, not just the classroom. (Authentic learning!)
- Track peer review/expansion of the article.
Hold a debate on creating a school policy for or against the use of Wikipedia in school research.
- Students are given sides to debate. (Often the best learning in debate occurs when you have to defend a position that you personally don't hold.)
- Formal rules of debate apply.
- Invite the principal, school board members, parents, etc. for a real audience.
- Resources:
Develop of list of categories that Wikipedia articles would fall into regarding their purpose.
- After the class/group determines the general categories, they could then generate lists of characteristics and exemplars for each purpose.
- This is an important lesson in new literacies.
Determine which categories of knowledge are more difficult to build. Why?
- The big questions:
- Is knowledge stable?
- Is it ever immune from interpretation?
- Why are some areas of knowledge more hotly contested than others?
- Why does knowledge change?
- Ask students to rank order the subtopics of a category of knowledge regarding level of difficulty/controversy
- Ex: Geography
Determine the similarities and differences of a Wikipedia article and an encyclopedia article.
- Could do this in terms of a specific article or articles in general.
- How could we make this a higher level lesson?
Look at the Discussion thread on a wikipedia entry and categorize the arguments
- What kind of argument is this?
- passionate?
- reasoned?
- informed?
- non-inclusive?
- biased?
- What do you think about the arguments?
- How do arguments shape the entry?
- Why are people making these arguments?
- What is not included in this argument?
Remember mistakes are everywhere!
An example of why not to trust what is in the textbook
WikipediaVision
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