Is Wikipedia still a Wicked-pedia?

Finishing off a research lesson with my Grade 8s, we were chatting about under what circumstances they are allowed to use Wikipedia when I found myself stumbling over my words. We had just been looking at a number of sites about Shakespeare - we tie in with their Shakespeare project in English - and examining which ones would be reliable, and not one of the ten sites we opened had any sort of bibliography or referencing. Many of them had no author or post date either. And yet here I was about to tell the students that the Shakespeare page on Wikipedia was unreliable because of the uncertainty of who had written it - even though the list of references was impressive!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

I carried on with my usual spiel of how they can use Wikipedia as a jumping off point - retracing a reference and seeing if that site is reliable, or using some of the information from the wiki to do another search for a more reliable site, but my mind was elsewhere:

Now I know that Wikipedia is not a good tool for deep research - it is, after all, an encyclopaedia and isn't made up of original research - but for a Grade 8 project on Shakespeare, when many of the other sites they are choosing to use don't tick all the boxes either? We do expect our students to use more than once source and to compare the information - so why can't one of the sites be Wikipedia?

(Interestingly, we did a search of one paragraph from the Shakespeare wiki and found it had been simply copied into two of the sites we had looked at - word for word, and no reference to Wikipedia!)

There have been several articles on this topic in the last couple of years, from Craig Blewett's Why It's Time The World Embraced Wikipedia and Sean Hampton-Cole's Yes, Wikipedia is a Reliable Source. Stop Saying It Isn't, and as Wikipedia closes off some of its pages to outside editors (such as the Shakespeare page), I think a change in attitude is needed. We should teach our young students how to use Wikipedia - what it means if a page is semi-protected, for example - and how to check a wiki by comparing it to other resources, including books. And, of course, as the students move into higher grades, continue to help them interrogate sites in order to locate reliable sources - instead of simply pushing them into the deep end of the Web - that they need for deeper research.

What is your policy on Wikipedia? Do you allow your students to use it for research? To what degree?

Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!