"The crowd-sourced site Wikipedia has long been bemoaned by the academic community as an unreliable source for student research. Some educators, however, have embraced the site—not only for pointing students in the direction of quality information, but also for teaching information literacy skills."
This article recommends you discuss/define terms such as crowd-sourced, open source, citation, plagiarism and more (and provides a link to an article '7 Things You Should Know About Wikis.'
The article then recommends steps students should take as they explore Wikipedia for articles, in other words, use media literacy/information literacy skills as you would with any website when using Wikipedia. This is a great source to help you think about how to teach skills to your students.
Many students choose to use Wikipedia as a primary resource and many teachers tell students they should not use Wikipedia...but what if you require that they confirm all information from other primary resources? Gleeson notes "I believe starting with the much maligned site had several benefits that will transfer over to the students’ use."
He discusses four issues that students often face when searching online:
* Where do I begin? (Based on my discussions with students most students tell me they use Google, but that does not mean that they look beyond the first page of results, or know how to do searches.)
* Key word search - Do your students know how to use key words? Wikipedia may help with this.
* Secondary source drives me to primary source - Allow the secondary source to provide some foundation, but confirm with primary sources.
* Effective time management for checking sources.
Additional information on each point may be found in the post.