Five Reasons For Public Schools To Defend Wikipedia

1. Many students who feel intimidated or excluded by the language, style, and location of other sources actually feel comfortable with Wikipedia. They feel they have an easily accessible, fairly comprehensive, and comprehensible introduction to many topics. Thus, an attack on Wikipedia is an attack on one of the few footholds that many students have into the overwhelming and complex realm of research. I think this could lead a student who might have explored a topic cursorily on Wikipedia (and maybe get interested by all the enticing hot links) to simply not do the assignment at all, or to skim an introduction on a non-engaging, non-hot-linked “authorized” site.

2. The primary charge against Wikipedia seems to be that “anyone” could edit the pages, which is alleged to makes it unreliable. Well, our students are “anyone” and so are we! If you disrespect the intellect and knowledge of the “anyone” you are also disrespecting our students. The claim that only PhDs and other “authorized scholars” can contribute to our collective knowledge is not only elitist it is also wrong. Did Benjamin Franklin have a PhD? Was Frederick Douglass allowed to? The students are sent the clear message that their words and ideas are not valued now, and will only be valued when they are PhDs or celebrities. This is profoundly disempowering to our students and, to my eyes, a direct continuation of the logic of corporate standardized tests and other assaults on the possibility of critical pedagogy.

3. The attack on Wikipedia has prompted the Wikipedia decision-makers to “tighten” Wikipedia by empowering a corps of monitors with the power to make arbitrary editing decisions. In at least several of the pages I regularly monitor the information content, the critical insight, and the language of the pages has deteriorated significantly. Wikipedia is only a half-open source at this point. Has anyone else noticed the parallels between the building of the walls in Palestine and New Mexico and the elite outrage at Wikipedia’s audacity in offering a non-authorized source of research? Julia Kristeva could have predicted all this.

4. The implication of the argument “Wikipedia is unreliable” is that other sources by “authorized scholars” ARE fundamentally reliable. Rather than make the simple, coherent, and correct argument that ALL sources contain bias, distortion, inconsistent citation, and other obstacles to a clear understanding of the world, by implication the “authorized” sources get an unearned certificate of credibility which (in my research experience) is misleading.

5. The “authorized sources” (usually) validate hegemonic views of the world. That is why they are authorized – one doesn’t require a PhD in Marxism to know that economic and political elites are able to shape the discourses of authorized academic knowledge to provide another bastion for their privilege. The attack on Wikipedia sends our students into the nets of the hegemonic sources AND attempts to convince them of the necessity of authorization by the (hegemonic) elite. I think I’m repeating many of the arguments of the Protestant revolution.