As the new semester begins, I am finding that I have to address this issue every single day in class. Wikipedia inevitably comes up. I have a lot of respect for Wikipedia, and the whole ideology behind t (though I lost some of that respect when a print version was announced). I struggle to explain to my students what “correct” and “incorrect” ways of Wikipedia might be. I’ve considered some of the assignments that I heard of from other professors, for example having students author Wikipedia articles in order to get a feel of how the Wikipedia editing process works. However, as I teach public speaking and therefore don’t deal with “content”, this seems like a task that doesn’t really fall within the perimeters of my curriculum. (In addition, I find the possibility of coming up with 48 interesting subjects that have not been covered by Wikipedia every semester particularly daunting).
Still, even though I lecture on this two days a week, I get bibliographies that include Wikipedia, and sometimes even bibliographies that include nothing but Wikipedia. Maybe I’m the one that’s getting this wrong. Since my students are using electronic sources almost exclusively, unless I specifically state that their (historical) subject requires them to actually face the possibility of opening a book, perhaps Wikipedia’s editorial system is better than nothing? I heard a BBC interview with the “inventor” of the Inernet on a podcast recently, most of the content of which can be found here. Isn’t Wikipedia at least a start toward this direction? Of course Wikipedia gets things wrong, but at least it gets them wrong by consensus.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently while trying to figure out a way of analyzing the plagiarism incident which has been discussed a lot within my field (performance/theatre): Routledge’s re-publication of a book under a different title and a different author’s name, virtually without any alteration. Richard Schechner has described this phenomen as the “Wikipediazation of scholarship”. But if Routledge can get away with this, why can’t my students? At least they’re actually giving Wikipedia (whoever that is) the credit. I will have to teach a class on research and research methodologies sometime next month… Looking forward to that!!!
