A pronouncement, on the educational value of Wikipedia

Wikipedia does more than provide a new location for information. It provides a whole new way of thinking about, and processing information. I say this not on the basis of my bubbly optimism for internet resources, though my apparent glee in previous posts may suggest it. Rather this comes from my own observations of how individual's interactions with Wikipedia vary from those with other resources.

The other day I was observing a group of high-school age students preparing for a research paper in a library. They had access to an abundance of traditional print resources (I should compliment this library on their magnificent taste in resources. There were many great books to be found there.) as well as computer terminals to access the internet. The students did seek out many books and spent a lot of time doing the traditional sort of research (taking notes from a desk, cross-referencing, that sort of thing). So, I felt satisfied that their schools, must be teaching them something about the old ways to find out information. That reminded me of medieval scholars who had to work so hard for their knowledge and wisdom, that their learning was seen as all the more noble for having been hard won.

Then something interesting happened. One of the students asked me if I knew who Levi Strauss was. She had found his name among a list of topics she would like to research. I told her that Levi Strauss was the Levi of Levi's Jeans. She became really excited and set off to learn more about him. I became concerned that I might have made a mistake, that maybe Levi Strauss didn't have a thing to do with jeans. So I went to the reliable Encyclopedia Britanica. I didn't find anything under S for Strauss. I didn't find anything under L for "Levi's brand jeans", the entry on denim was not very helpful. After ten minutes I decied to consult Wikipedia. One simple search and there was all the information you could bear on ol' Levi and his company and a plethora of links to even more information. Then I noticed that while the students did use the books to answer deep questions, they were relying on resources like Wikipedia for all the basic questions. For them knowledge wasn't isolated and static, like it was for those medieval scholars working by candel light. They saw information as dynamic and instantaneous, just as Wikipedia presents it with information flowing on and off the pages.

I do think it is important to teach from books, and show students how to learn from books. One of my favorite facts about books is that if you want to get rid of the ideas they contain you have to burn them. Wikipedia, and any of the information it contains, can be deleted, gone forever, in an instant. That sort of resource may be handy, but it cannot replace traditional encyclopedia's. For a book says that the information contained therein is so important, someone chose to write it down, someplace safe, someplace permanent, so that we should never forget. Information should flow and change, but any knowledge you think is worth keeping should be written down on a physical piece of paper, as if to say, "here are my thoughts for all to see, and I stand by them". Knowledge than can be destroyed with a keystroke will never have the same meaning as that which has to be burnt.