Thoughts by Techxplorer

In a previous post I wrote about the education.au seminar held on Monday of this week, I mentioned the issue that in some education institutions access to Wikipedia is blocked. There were a number of reasons suggested, with the overall theme being that access was blocked because Wikipedia was not acceptable and so blocking it was protecting the students.

I assume that the main reason Wikipedia was deemed not to be acceptable was because of the usual issues that come up around Wikipedia. In particular the fact that it isn’t an authoritative source and students shouldn’t be citing it in their work. Interestingly the overall feeling I got from people at the seminar was that we agreed that Wikipedia shouldn’t be cited in students work. Just as any other encyclopaedia shouldn’t be cited.

I think this is an issue that libraries are well placed to target via information literacy programs. Topics such as identifying relevant sources of information, critically evaluating websites, and using more than just Internet search engines are always topics that get covered. Perhaps these programs need to be extended to academics and other people working in the education sector.

I can’t help but wonder about the viability in the long term of blocking access to Wikipedia. The block doesn’t work at home where the student has the ability to access all sorts of information while on the Internet studying for their course. I would have thought that teaching students how to effectively use resources such as Wikipedia, and the Internet in general, would have been of more benefit to the students.

Pretending that they’re not going to use it because it has been blocked, or banned, isn’t the solution. We need to teach them that these types of websites are only the beginning and that there are many other information sources available. This is particularly relevant for University students. The library spends considerable amounts of money on subscriptions to journal articles, e-books, and other online content that you can cite in your work. Did you also know that many of them are available to users who are in the Library? You don’t have to be a student at the University to use them.

My point is this. Hiding Wikipedia behind a block or a ban is tantamount to putting our heads in the sand. We need to teach the students how to use it effectively and how to use other information resources as well. If we don’t they’re still going to use it, but they aren’t going to be using it in the right way.

The truly sad thing is that this was the overwhelming feeling of the people in the room and yet the majority felt constrained by the rules of their organisations. It is the people who “make the decisions” that we need to work on now, to get our point across.