Maybe, maybe not. I’ve heard various arguments about the validity of the study, but more importantly… it’s 4 years old. Given the speed at which wikipedia has grown in that time (both in terms of users and articles), I’m not convinced that any conclusion reached in 2005 still has validity when applied to the wiki of today.
“Wikipedia isn’t like a respected, peer-reviewed, paywalled journal!” Well, no shit.
“Wikipedia makes it easy to find information, which has the problem that it makes it too easy to find misinformation!” Pretty sure finding misinformation too easily is not a problem invented by Wikipedia, but alas I have no citation handy.
“Wikipedia’s content is not managed by a central authority in a top-down fashion!” Again, no shit.
The lack of content in this thread is higher than any article I could find on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia anyone can edit. Guess what, there is nothing else like it (well, in terms of popularity, anyway). This means it will be remarkably unlike other things. One imagines we wouldn’t require such redundancy in explanation, but here we are anyway.
If there’s one thing Wikipedia absolutely excels at, it is demonstrating the problem with paywalled goddamn journals, ostensibly there to further the cause of knowledge. Random idiots on the internet, as poor of a resource as they admittedly are, still manage to yield more useful information than I get out of an abstract, even if that information is only “where do I look next.”
Just cite to Wi… oh, bugger.
The case against the Internet:
- It is frequently inaccurate. See www.911truth.org for proof.
- It is badly written, badly organized, and inconsistent. It is so badly organized that a major company makes tons of money just helping you sift through it all. Go to 4chan to see example of poor writing.
- It encourages intellectual laziness. With so much information easily available people ghettoize their minds and search for like-minded thinkers. Again, see www.911truth.org for details.
- It is dry, dull, and humorless. See the Straight Dope message board.
The Internet sucks.
Busted! 
Let me try to clarify what I was saying in the OP. First of all, I didn’t intend to address the uses of Wikipedia for entertainment and personal edification purposes. I focus on its use in education. That may be short-sighted prejudice of mine; since I’m a teacher, I think about education a lot. That being said, I do flatter myself that the process of education is still kind of important, and thus anything which undermines learning can be quite bad indeed for our society.
So what is the purpose of education? Well, children enter school around age 3 knowing a few bits of technical knowledge such as how to use the toilet. They exit school around age 21 with a developed mental apparatus that allows them to function and perform the tasks that they’ll need in order to have a happy and productive life. That’s the theory, in any way. Of course, it does not work exactly that way for everyone, but would anyone question that it has to work that way for a sizable part of the population or else society will suffer?
The next question, then, is: “How is that purpose accomplished?” For a number of centuries, formal education has been accomplished mainly through two means: reading and writing. For reading, each teacher selects certain texts, which the students are supposed to read. In the process of reading these texts, the students are exposed to a variety of different ideas, styles of writing, and schools of thought. These ideas, styles, and thoughts challenge the students, forcing them to question their own thoughts, defend their beliefs, and extend those beliefs to new situations. It is important that students read from a wide variety of sources in order to create challenges and tension. As Socrates said, tension in the mind is necessary for true mental achievement.
Likewise for writing, the teacher assigns writing projects for the students to complete. The students then have to do some research, evaluate their sources, decide on an approach to the topic, organize and clarify their own thoughts. Again, the process challenges the students’ assumptions and forces them to defend, adapt, and explore.
The acceptance of Wikipedia in so many schools undermines the goals of education. The articles are too short, too bland, and often just too plain wrong to present students with serious challenges. A student could read the Wikipedia articles on everything written by Aristotle, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Blake and never encounter anything that forces them to react.
It is of course true that many other things have the same effect, starting with Cliff’s Notes and other such atrocities. However, Wikipedia is likely to have a worse effect because so many students think that it’s all-encompassing. The percentage of students who bother to do assigned reading has gone way down in recent years. (We looked at surveys about this in my teacher-training courses.) It’s not simply a matter of “stupid students will always do stupid things”. All students experience a pull towards intellectual pursuits and a contrary desire to spend as little time as possible on classwork. Wikipedia disturbs the balance by pulling them towards laziness. With a summary that they can get to in seconds, they have less motivation to put in the necessary minutes in the library stacks.
This wasn’t at all clear in the OP. “The Case Against Wikipedia In Formal Education” is a very different thread from “The Case Against Wikipedia, Period.”
I question the “mainly” part. Hearing/listening, watching, speaking/discussion, and hands-on doing/experiencing have long been a big part of the educational process too. But that may not be relevant to the issue at hand.
Is Wikipedia being “accepted” in so many schools as a replacement for original texts? I hadn’t realized that Wikipedia was being widely used in schools, in ways that went beyond those in which traditional encyclopedias have been used.
Is the problem that schools are allowing/encouraging students to use Wikipedia where they should be consulting the original sources? Or that students are doing so in defiance of their teachers’ requirements? Or what?
Not sure I understand this at all. You have to FAR more source checking and independent thinking when presented with a Wiki page that everyone knows could contain errors, than authoritative, deeply research tome by an expert in the field.
In fact best of all if they find an error they can actually get it changed!
I don’t wish to dismiss your concerns. But have you considered that, for a number of centuries, education was literally out of reach of almost everyone?
I cannot disagree with this. Personally, wikipedia helps me with this goal. Were it not for wikipedia, I wouldn’t have been able to learn about quite a few subjects. Heck, I’d never heard of continued fractions, something wikipedia introduced me to and gave me what I needed to continue on my own (there is a terrible lack of information on this subject available to the layman and I’ve unfortunately had to redevelop what are probably the basics of it). I know absolutely nothing about cryptography, yet wikipedia has enabled me to at least grasp basic concepts and terminology. Without it, I would not even have a starting point. So you must please forgive me for not siding with your position, as I see what your position has to offer: I grew up without wikipedia and the internet in general–as unreliable as they may be. And I would never consider, even momentarily, going back.
I disagree wholeheartedly, but perhaps there is some bias in the selection–by being a doper, I’m probably already more inquisitive than the average student. (Though in fact I am a student myself right now.)
Bah. Just point me to a site that’s more useful as an online & free introduction to everything you can think of and I’ll consider it.
I think the quality of Wikipedia - considering that anyone can edit it - is much higher than anyone would have any right to expect. It’s not perfect by a long shot, but there’s nothing else on the web that comes even close. I’m very glad it exists.
This is where I believe that Wikipedia blows away traditional general references. By looking at the “Discussion” and “History” pages for an entry you can learn about the contentious areas of the article.
For example, this (archived) discussion page for the Abraham Lincoln entry you can learn that Thomas DiLorenzo has serious criticisms directed at Lincoln (you can also learn that DiLorenzo is a history hack who should stick to economics). Traditional references (like EB) don’t have any kind of hint about the decisions made regarding what to include and what to ignore.
I have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. When I need the three sentence summary of a topic I love it; when I need more detail I hate it. When I can get the raw data I need in a second I love it; when I have to dig for twenty minutes through related articles to find out that this basic information is missing I hate it. When I’m looking for concrete facts I love it; when I see it cited as a definitive source on more subjective concepts I hate it. When I need a bit of pop culture trivia I love it; when I need some basic information on more obscure cultural works I hate it. When I want a launching point I love it; when it’s used as the final word on a topic I hate it.
The great stuff in Wikipedia is tied up with the bad especially when it comes to usage.
It was my impression that most grade schools ban the use of Wikipedia as any kind of source or research aid. Was I wrong?
I don’t know. But that sounds terrible. Ban its use as any kind of research aid? They don’t think kids should ever read it for any purpose? Sounds awfully stifling and curiosity-crushing.
Wikipedia is less accurate than certain other sources on certain topics, but meh… I’ve learned a lot from it.
The erroneous information source that really troubles me is people. Many of them spout absurdly inaccurate data with no disclaimers not to trust them. And that includes some teachers I’ve known.
Society lets these people serve as instructors to our youth, our naive blank slate young people. There should be banners in every school proclaiming that teachers are not trustworthy, and that everything they say should be taken with great skepticism.
Yep. And don’t get me started on grandparents. Those supposed founts of wisdom and experience.
To sum up: most people don’t need protection from Wikipedia, and those that do likely have other—worse—sources of mis-information assaulting them.
I agree. That’s why it was my impression that public schools tend to be stifling and curiosity-crushing. 
There have been other studies. Wikipedia has links to many of them in the Reliability of Wikipedia article. It also links to Encyclopaedia Brittanica’s rebuttal of the original study.
Believe it or not this is sort of how I feel about Wikipedia. It is the leading force in making the internet dull.
We have reached the point where almost any general query you type into Google gets a Wikipedia page in the top five results (if not the top result). Everyone and their mother is using it to look up information. It is a huge phenomenon. Yet, as the OP says, it is badly written and disorganized. Every article reads like it was written by a committee, which it was. If you’re a good writer with some authority on a subject, any changes you make to a Wikipedia article will be gradually eroded into the bland and vacant prose that defines the rest of the site. And if you decide to post your own article somewhere else, the best you can really hope for is that someone on Wikipedia reads it and injects some of your text into the article there, because that’s probably the most exposure you’ll get.
Reading Wikipedia is a lot like eating at McDonald’s. Isn’t it time that the connoisseurs of information, the fighters of ignorance, asked for something with flair? With style? With just an ounce of personality? Wouldn’t you rather read an article by Cecil Adams than an article on Wikipedia? Would you rather see the internet becoming more like Wikipedia or more like The Straight Dope? From where I sit, it seems like we’re headed in the wrong direction.
Your complaint makes no sense. Encyclopedias are always dull and dry. If you don’t want to read an encyclopedia type article, and if wikipedia often ends up being in the first few hits when you google, then move your mouse down a little and choose the another hit. Is it going to kill you? Great Og on a pogo stick, talk about an over reaction.
I don’t agree. The possibility you outline just results in a cite on a wiki page that leads to an article containing no original research, just an assertion (because it derived from wiki in the first place). Checking the quality of cites has always been necessary if one is seeking quality information. The difference between wikipedia and a hard copy source is that one can read the cites with the click of a mouse. Again, I don’t think it’s more susceptible than traditional sources.
I don’t know of a single school or educator that “accept” wikipedia as a primary source of information. Are you just yelling at a strawman, or can you provide cites that show universities embracing wikipedia as scholarly resources?