"Also, the color scheme and design of the website is exactly the same as Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is known for false information, and cannot be used for research papers. I feel that this site is similar to Wikipedia; therefore, this site's information cannot be trusted."
There are two reasons why you can't use Wikipedia as a source for citation in arguments where scientific validation is a serious concern: (1) the source is not stable. What is there one day may no longer ne there the next day. (2) The authorship is anonymous and articles have not been peer reviewed. So, whatever claims appear in the citation can't be traced back to a particular individual or institutional environment with a recognizable history of validly contributing to scientific knowledge building. It doesn't mean, though, that what you read in the Wikipedia is worthless or that students should be discouraged from using it in their explorations. Quite to the contrary, in my view. In many areas, Wikipedia is an excellent resource. Students can often use it as a good starting point for their research because it's free, but they will have to move beyond it to check what they read against sources that meet the criteria for citation mentioned above. Many good entries in the Wikipedia are linked to or cite such quotable sources, which should make it easy for students to do such further research. As WikiEducator's mission is in the first place to provide curriculum materials, it's unlikely that it will want to become a quotable resource, for the same reason that printed curriculum materials developed for schools are unlikely to end up among the referenced works cited in scientific papers, unless the paper is in the area of the sciences of learning. The student is wrong if s/he thinks that you cannot trust the information in Wikipedia simply because it is Wikipedia and that, if it is in one of those other sources, it can be automatically trusted. Anything written will always have to be subject to the critical scrutiny of those who care to read. S/he is right in expressing distrust in a source that has earlier been found to be weak in validity control. In my view, the student's remark points once again to the important opportunity for WikiEducator to develop materials and processes that lead students to becoming critically constructive users and producers of the growing wealth of knowledge available in a distributed fashion via different channels, one of them being the Internet. Jan -- Jan Visser, Ph.D. President & Sr. Researcher, Learning Development Institute E-mail: [email protected] Check out: http://www.learndev.org and http://www.facebook.com/learndev Blog: http://jvisser-ldi.blogspot.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
