Teaching Wikipedia as a Research Tool and Collaborative Wikis

Abstract

Wikipedia often gets a bad rap because, as a resource that anyone can edit, it is inherently unreliable ââ¬Âââ¬Â but it is this very quality that makes Wikipedia an excellent platform for teaching critical research skills such as source evaluation, types of resources that work in the early stages of research, source triangulation, and an awareness of the ways that arguments are used to make and support claims to authority and validity in Wikipedia itself. Because Wikipedia's content is so wideranging, it also lends itself to writingââ¬Âacrossââ¬Âtheââ¬Âcurriculum assignments as it can be used to examine, for instance, how knowledge in science is reported on, how historical interpretation is evaluated, or how to convey core principles of mathematics to a nonââ¬Âspecialist audience (among many other possibilities).