Students Advised by Professors not to Use Wikipedia

I have just bumped into an interesting post on Powerset blog about a small survey they have carried out to see students’ attitude towards Wikipedia. Powerset is a semantic search engine recently acquired by Microsoft. The first product launched by Powerset is the tool to search Wikipedia to get more relevant results using the power of natural language processing technologies.

The reason for this study is that the guys at Powerlabs noticed substantial number of feedback emails sent from various .edu domains so they started to wonder if Wikipedia and Powerset-powered search of its content were getting popular among the students community. To get some evidence they simply performed a small survey (with 200 college students participating) to get to know what students think of Wikipedia and how they use it.

The survey confirmed the suspicion: students love Wikipedia and often rely on it in their studies yet professors seem to be very unhappy about it. To be more specific, 90% of respondents said they had used Wikipedia content to complete an assignment. What’s more, about 25% of students admitted that they always use Wikipedia for schoolwork.

And both these figures are to be expected given how easy it is to find all the basic information about a place, an event or a person on Wikipedia, there is another reply that is somewhat disturbing: 73% of students have been told by teachers not to use the user-generated encyclopedia. It is a commonplace already that teachers are not happy about students using Wikipedia to find all the information they need because everything is collected in one convenient place so students don’t even have to think or apply any additional efforts of their own.

But contrary to this assumption, there is another fact in the study: about half of all the students claimed that they used Wikipedia not as a destination for all the knowledge but instead relied on references provided for Wikipedia entries to do some extra reading on the subject they were interested in. To a certain extent that proves that teachers should not really deem their students too lazy to click a few extra links looking for the right answer or additional insight.

It really looks like for many students Wikipedia serves as some sort of an entry point to knowledge located elsewhere with the main advantage being the fact that all the links to the most reliable editor-picked information on the subject are conveniently located in one place. This is very similar to performing a search on Google to find information on your own – but with Google it will take you much more time to find the most relevant content.

And believe me, I know everything mentioned in Wikipedia entries needs to be double-checked to make sure the facts are actually true. But maybe instead of warning students against using Wikipedia (or even banning it from school’s computers) teachers should educate those very students on how the human-powered encyclopedia could be used wisely and to its full potential. Better yet, I think it could be a good idea for teachers to actually advise students to check Wikipedia entries for a topic against facts they learn in class and help edit such entries if incorrect to improve them and help further generations of students find more reliable information on Wikipedia.