On Wikipedia

I think that Wikipedia gets a bad rap too often. We have all heard of the instances where a teacher creates a fake wikipedia entry and some student cites it as a source in an essay. Wikipedia also has errors, but so does Encylcopedia Britannica (which students are encouraged to use). In fact, you can type Errors in Encyclopedia Britannica into Wikipedia and you will get pages and pages of errors.This is not to say that we should encourage students to use wikipedia indiscriminantly. It does have its limitations.
It is unedited. Yeah Yeah, it is edited by other users, but not by professionals with credentials and so your wikipedia entry may be altered by a 10 year old.
Seondly, wikipedia does not have entries for all kinds of topics. If it is not popular enough to get someone to write an entry, it doesn't exist.
Thirdly, wikipedia does not know how to deal with sensitive or controversial topics. If you examine the Yom Kippur war or any of the Israeli conflicts, you will see that Arabs and Israelis are constantly trying to change the tone of the page by "spinning" things in their own favour.
All this said, the site does contain a lot of decent information. I encourage students to use the site to get started and then to switch to more reputable sources. For the record, I tell the students not to use any encyclopedia as a source, Britannica or otherwise. They are all superficial sources.
So maybe we need to cool our jets on the use of wikipedia. It has its limitations, but also has good uses. Let's be honest now. How many of us use it regularly too. I bet the number is quite high.
I have found that doing research on some topics is becoming increasingly difficult. First of all, as we know, the sites that appear first in Google are sites that pay for the privilege of coming high on the list. Many of those sites are marketing sites, but many more are book sites ie. buy my book.
So if you type for example, "blog impair literacy" into your google search window, many of the top hits are sites which sell books or political sites that you have to subscribe to. The internet isn't as free as it once was. Wikipedia is usually near the top of the list. Google also allows stupid things to happen. Sometimes you will type, "dammit it's hot out" into a google search window and the first hit back is from ebay saying, "Buy dammit it's hot out NOW on ebay."
People have rightly learned that the web can be used for commerce and they are jigging it in such a way that many of our search attempts return sales sites first.
It just makes research skills more important for the student in the classroom.
Cheers,Dan