This FAQ page deals with some questions that teachers, librarians and school administrators might have about the content of information in Wikipedia, and use of Wikipedia by students. If you are thinking about assigning Wikipedia as a class project see Wikipedia:School and University projects. For more general information, see Wikipedia:Advice for parents.
Concepts such as open source, copyleft, collaborative writing, and volunteer contributions for the public good can be new and unfamiliar ideas to many students. Wikipedia offers an opportunity for educators to explore concepts of public trust that are likely to continue growing in prominence throughout the lives of today's population of youth.
Some common questions that students and educators ask about Wikipedia are answered below based on the status of Wikipedia and on reasonable projections for its immediate future.
The term "wiki" is derived from the phrase "WikiWiki", which is the Hawaiian word for "quick". A wiki is a web site which allows people to contribute content; see our article on wikis for more information about this.
Wikipedia's objective is to become a compendium of existing, published knowledge. The reliablity of Wikipedia articles is limited by the external sources on which they are supposed to rely, as well as by the ability of Wikipedia's editors to understand those sources correctly and their willingness to use them properly. Therefore, articles may or may not be reliable and readers should always use their own judgment. Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
Wikipedia is rapidly developing, and its objective is to increase its reliability as a source of information. Readers are encouraged to compare articles to what they already know and improve their accuracy and detail. Articles about many of the major sciences were developed from other free or public domain encyclopedias. This provides a reliable basis upon which Wikipedia's editors could expand. Because of its growing utility, Wikipedia is cited almost daily in the press.
It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular articles are more accurate because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from particular issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information, see Wikipedia:Criticisms.
What prevents someone from contributing false or misleading information?
Wikipedia's content control mechanisms are reactive rather than preventive, and anyone can, at this very moment, go to almost any page and change the information to make it false or misleading. Although the majority of edits improve the encyclopedia, vandalism of this kind is all too frequent.
Fortunately, such deliberate errors are not allowed to linger. Hundreds of dedicated Wikipedia contributors monitor real-time edit feeds (particularly for important or controversial articles) and quickly revert inappropriate edits. Many articles are on one or more editors' personal watchlists (and major articles are on hundreds), and this provides a second layer of content control. Third, Wikipedia's huge user base is constantly analyzing and improving every article, undoing vandalism as it is found. If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
The key to this reactive system is that Wikipedia, unlike mainstream print sources, keeps a full history of every change to every article. Nothing is ever lost, and no abuse is permanent. See Wikipedia:Edit history for more information.
All that being said, Wikipedia is certainly not perfect. A reader may have the bad luck of arriving at a page just after it has been vandalized and before it has been repaired. There have been incidents in the past where vandalism has been discovered still in place months after the fact. At any given time there is almost certainly inaccurate information somewhere in Wikipedia. It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent bad-faith edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's the great part of Wikipedia.
It depends on what teachers accept. The best policy for all writing is to have more than one source. Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research. Teachers might ask students what they did to validate the information they learned from Wikipedia. Using a comprehensive search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, students can easily compare Wikipedia content with information from other reputable websites. Most Wikipedia articles also contain an "External links" section at the bottom, which often leads to other relevant sites. Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.
For purposes of establishing authorship and finding more sources, students may also find the articles' "History" tabs useful, as these detail every contribution — the contributor and the details of what was contributed. All of our contributors have talk pages for leaving them messages. While logged in, a toolbox link ("E-mail this user") is also visible beside the user pages of many registered contributors. Other means of contacting Wikipedians are listed at Wikipedia:Contact us.
Wikipedia has similar safety issues to other equally open environments. Participation in Wikipedia requires youths to know basic Internet safety practices (which they should already know).
Wikipedia has the advantage that most communication is done in an open, public, reviewable manner (even personal talk page messages are readable by anybody). Note, however, that in contrast to some sites directed towards youth, Wikipedia does not have staff to patrol discussion pages or remove inappropriate comments; it only has volunteer administrators, who will exclude people breaching civility rules, but who will not censor conversations if they deal with adult topics.
Children and their parents must understand that any person no matter how good or ill motivated, is free to participate in the project. While some child-focused online communities will remove members who are found/suspected of being dangerous towards children in the real/offline world; Wikipedia will not remove users based on outside activities (regardless of the legality or morality of those activities). Hence, no child should ever assume that if somebody has an account on Wikipedia, then they're safe to meet in person. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project, not a social environment for making offline friends.
Wikipedia is not bowdlerized or censored. It contains articles on subjects such as racial slurs, controversial political and religious groups and movements, and sexual acts. However, the information about sexual topics will probably be more neutral and factually accurate than what young teens hear from their peers, and no more erotic than the material of North American or European sex education classes; that is, articles on these topics are kept to facts and are not meant to incite or titillate the reader. Articles on human reproduction may contain anatomical, non-pornographic photographs of sexual organs, which certain cultures may find inappropriate for small chidren. However, Wikipedia can be configured to hide these images if needed. Note also that although it discusses the methodology of terrorism and violence, Wikipedia is not a how-to guide.
Pages which are normally appropriate for children to use are occasionally vandalized with rude words or content which may be offensive. Vandalism is normally noticed and removed within a few minutes—if not seconds—but it is still possible that a person may access a page before this is dealt with. Teachers should supervise young children on Wikipedia, as they would in any other online environment. However, the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a specific selection of 5,500 articles suitable for school children and has been checked and edited by deletion for this audience. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organised around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.
Open-source media is a kind of information produced by open groups of developers in which anybody who wants to can use the information. Open-source production emerged among software engineers with the production of Linŭ, a free software computer operating system. MediaWiki is an open source software package that supports an open source encyclopedia.
Open-source production relies on qualified users to maintain a constantly improving collection, whether it is an open collection of computer code or of encyclopedic information. Open source collections typically maintain back-up resources, so if a developer accidentally damages the code or the content, it can easily be reverted to an earlier, stable version. The same backup system provides protection against malicious damage to an open-source project.
Few surveys have developed reliable answers to why people contribute to open source works like Wikipedia. Some sort of public interest or community spirit is often part of the motive. Open-source projects offer an opportunity to contribute to something that has lasting value and that will continue to grow. Open-source publishing allows writers and software developers to apply their skills outside of a strictly business environment. Casual writers and editors sometimes participate as a hobby or as a learning experience. Classrooms may evaluate and post information as a learning activity. Volunteering is also one of the few ways writers and Web designers can gain experience and exposure without already having any.
Wikipedia is relatively new, but chances are always getting better than ever that you have heard of it before. Wikipedia's rapid growth recently has been reported in many prominent media outlets. Wikipedia was established in January 2001, and is now making a place for itself in the world's collection of knowledge. As the encyclopedia grows, more people learn about it every day, much in the same way Internet use surged in the late 1990s. See Wikipedia:Press coverage.
Most people will encounter Wikipedia for the first time through a search engine. Many Google search queries, for instance, will return a Wikipedia article on the first results page. Others may see it referenced on other Web sites or in newspapers.
Many other online encyclopedias simply copy (parts of) Wikipedia, which is allowed because it uses a free content license. This should be mentioned on the page, but the message can be hard to notice. So you may have come across a Wikipedia article without knowing it. However, considering the speed at which Wikipedia develops, these are often quite out of date.
Wikipedia does not advertise as many new services do, so public knowledge of Wikipedia is mostly a result of word of mouth, readers discovering the service while browsing online, or people learning about the encyclopedia from news reports.
Beyond information from the encyclopedia, what can students learn from Wikipedia?
Most youths will likely at some point become involved in interactive online activities. For educators, youths' involvement with Wikipedia provides an opportunity to survey youths' understanding of online safety, and to teach appropriate practices. Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.
Wikipedia provides an opportunity for teachers to discuss the concept of the open content. Wikipedia is an opportunity to participate in an open community that relies primarily on mutual respect and cooperation, but which is not related to familiar authority figures some youths might tend to oppose.
Editing in Wikipedia is an opportunity to learn to participate in collective editorial processes. Wikipedia presents a ready opportunity for youths to research, compile and publish articles for peer review. For youths who contribute images, selection and production of an image provides opportunities to learn what a market wants from an artist. Youths who master skills for accurate writing and drawing about encyclopedic subjects are better equipped to develop their own style in more creative genres.
Because all articles in Wikipedia must conform to neutral point-of-view, students participating in collaborative editing activities on Wikipedia are building experience in detecting and eliminating bias in writing.
Access to a wiki database can be password protected, to allow groups to develop an open document within their membership. Passwords can allow a wiki to be developed by a school club, a teachers group, a regional group of schools, or any group within an educational community. Wikis might be used for school histories, to develop yearbook material or as class projects. A group can operate a wiki project online or within a closed local area network.
