Last month, the history department at Middlebury College banned students from citing Wikipedia in essays and exams ("Daily Debriefing," Feb. 16). Although the department did acknowledge that Wikipedia "may lead one to a citable source," the renunciation of the online encyclopedia is nonetheless a step backward from recent technological advancements in the proliferation of information.
While academia should take a stance on Wikipedia, this position should not consist of outright prohibition. Instead of issuing categorical statements dismissing the innovative, enormously popular open-source encyclopedia from academic discourse, professors should educate students about its proper use when teaching the research process.
One of the motivations that Middlebury faculty cited in denouncing Wikipedia was its democratic and dynamic nature. However, instead of being grounds for dismissal, the encyclopedia's openness and dynamicity are key reasons why it should be embraced as a part of the research process. Wikipedia is a consensus-based forum where both traditional and less traditional experts and enthusiasts can voice their knowledge of a topic.
According to Wikipedia, there are currently over 3.5 million users with registered accounts, and potentially many more unregistered ones. When combined with the ease of editing the encyclopedia, this results in more than 113 million edits that have been made to the encyclopedia since July 2002, making it a massive, up-to-date repository of knowledge.
Middlebury professor Neil Waters told the Associated Press that this repository is "an ideal place to start research but an unacceptable way to end it." This is a reasonable statement, but Wikipedia is in that way no different from any other source, academically accepted or not. The idea of an indefinite, unqualified ban on Wikipedia citations is unmerited and is damaging to its potential as a constituent of the research process. Students should indeed be warned about potential inaccuracies and plagiarism concerns in Wikipedia; however, the encyclopedia's beneficial elements, such as its diverse currency of sources, should be welcomed.
Academic circles should acknowledge the rise of open-source knowledge and should accommodate it within existing discourse. This need not involve violating the standards of peer review and authorship credentials. At an undergraduate level, when students are making their first forays into research writing, professors should instead incorporate acceptable Wikipedia usage into the broader discussion of the research process. They should help the students learn how to tap this source of knowledge proficiently and incorporate it into their research in an acceptable manner.
The academically acceptable use of Wikipedia should require students to learn how to verify information, how to parse quality information from misinformation and how to follow up on relevant information in other sources to deepen their investigation. These skills are not unique to usage of open sources but are instead necessary for any type of research.
Although in most circumstances Wikipedia may be more useful in the early parts of the research process, Middlebury's proscription fails to accommodate for the future potential of open-source knowledge. Academic research has long had to learn to accept and make full use of new technological resources. Just three decades ago, research tools that are now taken for granted, such as computerized library catalogs and online journal databases, were inconceivable. Some 10 years ago, Wikipedia was equally unimaginable to a vast majority of people who now use it avidly almost every day. Since its debut in January 2001, Wikipedia has expanded to more than 6 million articles, and has become the 12th most visited website. If it has accomplished this in six years, then one can just imagine what it can do in 10 or 20.
The sooner the academic world will take an appropriate attitude toward a new source of knowledge, the sooner it will be able to reap its full potential. Rather than denouncing Wikipedia or seeing it as a threat to traditional scholarly pursuits, academics could make worthy, reciprocal contributions to the encyclopedia, expanding the scope and increasing the quality of this globally available, easy to use information.
