Jimmy Says Wikipedia Good… Teachers Bad

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia says that teachers who don’t let students use Wikipedia are “bad educators”.  He says that new editing and checking procedures have made Wikipedia more trustworthy.

Try to edit the article for Hillary Clinton.  The edit tab has been removed.  Notice the lock in the top-right corner of the article.  To modify this particular resource, you must first login.  This is one of the measures that has been incorporated to protect articles from vandalism.

I think there are two valuable components to Wikipedia.  One is the shear volume of information.  The second is the external references to supporting information.  The combination almost guarantees something about almost any topic with a link to an authoritative site.

One of the 21st century skills that our students need is to be able to determine what is authoritative and what is not.  Wikipedia is the perfect place to develop this skill.

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