Wikipedia to take on academia

Wikipedia prides itself on being the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. \nBecause it's so easily accessed and covers such a wide range of topics -- 1.3 million and growing -- Wikipedia has become a major resource for college students.\nThat's a trend that has some faculty members making Wikipedia a core part of their curriculum and others denouncing it as the ultimate proof that the Internet is full of unreliable information.\nThe English-language version of Wikipedia was founded in January 2001 by Jim Wales, who dropped out of the doctoral program at the Kelley School of Business in the mid-1990s.\nIn the past five-and-a-half years, Wikipedia has grown to become one of the top 20 most-visited Web sites, according to Alexa. \nFew IU faculty members surveyed for this article completely dismissed the relevance of Wikipedia or had major issues with students at least consulting the Web site to become familiar with a term or concept.\nWikipedia becomes an issue in the classroom when students attempt to cite it in their work, professors said.\n"I would consider Wikipedia to be fundamentally an entertainment Web site -- similar to, say, CNN and its wildly unhelpful representation of 'news'," assistant professor of history Konstantin Dierks wrote in an e-mail.\nDierks' view might actually be the minority at IU. In an unscientific survey of IU faculty members conducted by the Indiana Daily Student, 44 percent of faculty members said that even if they have issues with the Web site, they at least allow students to cite Wikipedia articles in work they turn in, compared to 35 percent who expressly disallow it. \nAn additional 5 percent said whether they allowed students to cite Wikipedia depended on the assignment or class level they were teaching. Finally, 16 percent of those responding to the survey said they either did not have a classroom policy on Wikipedia or it did not apply to what they taught.\nWhile casually researching one of his favorite NHL teams, the Edmonton Oilers, David Rubenstein, a professor in the Kelley School of Business, became convinced Wikipedia can offer students unique information.\n"Here was a team that didn't have a lot of talent but went to the Stanley Cup Finals," he said. "I thought 'What is the secret to their success?' I thought, maybe it was their management, so I looked up their coach, Craig MacTavish and found out he had spent time in jail because he had struck and killed a woman while drunk driving ... I had never heard that before. I don't think I could find that anywhere else in the world."\nEven though he allows students to cite Wikipedia in assignments, Rubenstein warns that he doesn't see it as the final authority on a topic.\nMany other faculty members said they allow Wikipedia to be cited but never as the only source.\n"For every paper, students have a minimum number of scholarly (peer-reviewed) references that they must utilize. Wikipedia doesn't count as one of these, but they can use it, and cite it, to get a first look at a concept on which they are writing," assistant professor of social work Sabrina Williamson Sullenberg said in an e-mail.\nAssistant professor of fine arts Julie Van Voorhis allows students to cite Wikipedia as long as they can support the information.\n"I allow it, with a caveat -- the information cited must be correct, and the burden of proof for the accuracy of the information is with the student," she said in an e-mail. "Wikipedia is uneven, but does contain some interesting articles. Besides, in our digital/Web-oriented age, the ability to assess the validity and usefulness of Web resources is an important life skill."\nWhether or not they allow Wikipedia citations, many professors voiced concerns with the overall accuracy of Wikipedia articles. Those concerns might not be entirely warranted, though.\nIn December 2005, the science journal, Nature, chose 50 entries on various scientific topics from Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to be peer-reviewed by an expert in the field. The study found that on average, Wikipedia articles contain 3.9 errors per article while Britannica articles contain 2.9 and concluded that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries."\nBut it's not just students citing Wikipedia in their papers. According to Wikipedia, in 2005, 57 academic articles were published that cited an entry from the Web site.\nChristian Sandvig is an assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Later this year, he is due to publish an article titled "The Structural Problems of the Internet for Cultural Policy," in which he cites the "slashdot effect" entry in Wikipedia as "an excellent overview" on the topic.\nThe slashdot effect is when a larger Web site links to a smaller one, causing it to slow down or even shut down for a period because of the excessive traffic.\n"I think this was a special case," Sandvig said. "The paper is about communications technology, so I think it's appropriate. I think it's different than if (the paper) was a biography of an English king."\nSandvig said he feels the article is accurate because of his expertise with the topic and that if the Wikipedia article is tampered with, it will be quickly fixed, but he still warns students about the site's credibility.\n"I tell them to picture some fish," he said. "There's a larger fish eating a smaller fish, and that one's eating a smaller fish and so on. Those are all different sources. Wikipedia is the smallest one, and the biggest is a peer-reviewed journal"