Hello fellow educators, welcome to podcast number 45. Today we continue the discussion about Informationalism and specifically the Wikipedia phenomenon. The last half of the podcast I want to explore the important concept of teaching our kids to “think critically.” We are still sending out free copies of my book “Discipling this Generation for a Digital World” to any one that asks; details to follow at the end of the podcast.

It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Their original goal was to produce a free online encyclopaedia called Nupedia that had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors to write the articles. Unfortunately the project had to be abandoned because they couldn’t get enough academics and experts to write and those that said they would were slow to get the materials to Nupedia.  So Wales and Sanger used, what is now known as Wiki technology, to allow anyone to contribute. Thus Wikipedia was born. I do find it ironic that Wikipedia gets its loudest and most frequent criticism from academics. Where were they in 2001?

Wiki technology started up seven years earlier by Ward Cunningham. His goal was to create internet technology that allowed users anywhere to create and collaborate on pages that can easily be stored in a web database. This would allow for simple indexing and a unified editing place. Thus we get the name Wikipedia, a collaborative data base of articles edited by any visitor who will register as an author.

Today and I literally mean today, Monday morning at 9:38 am there are 2,723,871 articles in English. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. Wikipedia had over 684 million visitors in 2008 putting it the fifth most visited site on the internet behind Google, MSN, Yahoo and EBay. Wikipedia is number one on the list of non-profit sites visited by a long shot. It is the largest single repository of collaborative knowledge in all of human history. The next largest work in English is the Encyclopaedia Britannica with 120,000 online articles. It should be noted that the average words per article in Britannica is about 15% less than the average Wikipedia article and has  less than one third the amount of hyperlinks.

Let’s face it Wikipedia is very popular with the kids. A recent survey of university students revealed that over 90 percent had used Wikipedia for their research. I think you could equally find this true today amoung high school students. If that number is lower it is only because many high school students haven’t discovered research. When I asked our own campus school staff and HCOS admin team nearly everyone admitted that they have used Wikipedia from time to time.

So what’s the issue here you might ask? It goes back to our discussion in last week’s podcast. The issue here is about our new emerging epistemology. You may recall we defined this to mean “the authority of our knowledge.” It is how we determine something we know and believe to be real and true. In today’s Postmodern world we see a democratization of knowledge. We believe something is true and right because most people believe that thing to be true and right. We say ‘so many people cannot be wrong about something so important thus it must be true or right.’ We run polls to see what we believe. We elect representatives to make sure what we believe becomes law. If it is legal then it must be right on some level. Eventually the loudest, most persistent voice will prevail.

Wikipedia has taken this approach towards an encyclopaedia. Anyone, anywhere can submit and edit an article on any topic for the online encyclopedia. There are no credentials needed and you do not need to show any proof of your knowledge on the topic. You can go into any article and re-edit its contents without the original author’s permission something I have done on many occasions. Thus we see a deep mistrust of Wikipedia by the academic community because you never know whose work you are reading in Wikipedia. Here is what journalist Nathanael West posted in an article for the Chicago area Courier Times:

“Compared to those convoluted days when the Internet was still in its infancy, Web users certainly are warier about the accuracy of information gleaned from certain sites. Yeah, right. The vast sea of Internet data has been murky from the get-go, and it’s not getting any clearer, thanks to seemingly reliable sites that continue to muddy the waters with sometimes-questionable facts. Perhaps the most notorious culprit is Wikipedia. Equal parts online encyclopedia, almanac and tabloid, it is exhaustively comprehensive but also corruptible because its content can be submitted and edited by users who are not always qualified or objective. And the temptation to abandon the long quest for multiple, accurate sources and settle down in a monogamous relationship with Wikipedia can prove almost overwhelming — especially to the busy college student.”

This sentiment describes the common argument in the past years but the debate has begun to change. I remember when I would talk with our teaching staff and nearly everyone that understand what Wikipedia was would shun such an open source idea for knowledge. In fact several teachers were encouraging its use as the first place to begin research. My search of Google for the “Pro’s and Con’s of Wikipedia” found this professors comments. Mark Wilson, professor of geology at the College of Wooster, in his article, Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia wrote:

“A generation of students was warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that it is the first place they go to start a research project, look up an unfamiliar term from lecture, or find something disturbing to ask about during the next lecture. In fact, we learned too that Wikipedia is indeed the most convenient repository of information ever invented, and we go there often — if a bit covertly — to get a few questions answered. Its accuracy, at least for science articles, is actually as high as the revered Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown by a test published in the journal Nature. It is time for the academic world to recognize Wikipedia for what it has become: a global library open to anyone with an Internet connection and a pressing curiosity. The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality, and the librarians were right: the world has not been the same since. If the Web is the greatest information delivery device ever, and Wikipedia is the largest coherent store of information and ideas, then we as teachers and scholars should have been on this train years ago for the benefit of our students, our professions, and that mystical pool of human knowledge.”

When raising the issue with our own teaching staff I found Joanne Robideau’s insight most helpful. She doesn’t discourage students from Wikipedia but teaches that when you go to any given article you will generally find a bias in pointing towards the positive aspect of the information being consulted. Being a Media Lit teacher she uses the encyclopedia to research cultural perspectives and finds that, in most cases, an article will be written by a fan of a group, book or movie will have a positive spin. This makes sense, because it takes a bit of motivation to write knowledgably about a topic or issue. In subjects that are controversial then you will find battles that rage over what is submitted. One author will post an article or an edit then another will come in and post or repost their position. In the article on “Abortion” you can observe a history of posts that often came from various bias on the subject. Language being the main battle ground here facilitated quite the argument over what was in the womb, a baby or a fetus. Fetus has won out but a quick click through to that article and fetus is defined as “a developing human, after the embryonic stage and before childbirth.” The developers responsible for Wikipedia are trying to solve this by placing disclaimer tags in the articles pointing out that certain topics are deemed controversial thus the neutrality is disputed. They have encouraged authors to post to a discussion page before their article or edit goes to the final version although they are careful not to interrupt the publication process unless the fighting gets out of hand. They also have tags for topics or subtopics that don’t have any outside citations. They allow the content but try to warn you that it doesn’t have much to back up the ideas being presented. Another point Joanne made was the ability to link from Wikipedia to other sites that the author or authors have used for the topic. She carefully pointed out that these sites continue to enforce the author’s bias towards their perspective and probably avoid any sites that give a different view.

Interestingly, every time I raise the issue of using Wikipedia to teachers the answer is almost always, we have to develop critical thinking skills in our students. Of course this makes sense. We live in a world where access to information is prolific but the ability to discern truth has been muddied by the sheer volume of it all.  We hear teachers warn, ‘students will become lazy and site Wikipedia as their only source of research.’ But is this really what is happening? Perhaps, but I contend that students have always been lazy. In the rare event that I visited my high school library I pulled the only source I ever quoted, the World Book Encyclopedia, our school couldn’t afford Britannica. The internet is a lazy man’s dream. I can now sort multiple sources and never have to leave my living room. If I am interested I can go beyond the wiki page and link to multiple websites at the click of my mouse. If I am ambitious I can refine my search techniques to find the counterpoints. And if I really am hungry for the truth, I can click into the Encyclopedia Britannica, because as we all know, it is always right. Our dilemma hasn’t changed it has only been highlighted by the internet. We have trusted Academia for truth and authority, because, well, they are smarter than everyone else. But we have assumed that their presentation of knowledge was without bias.

So what do we really mean when we talk about teaching kids to “think critically?” Everybody agrees we should be doing this but in most cases this skill remains undefined. Let’s take a first crack at it this week and I invite you to email me some of your thoughts on this.

In my first stab at defining this skill I did what any post-modern researcher would do and looked it up at Wikipedia. Unfortunately this article was tagged for not posting adequate references and many of the internal quotations gave no citation. Wow, my own critical thinking skills kicked in because the guys at Wikipedia were looking out for me. In spite of their warnings I thought the article was somewhat helpful. At least I liked the author’s analysis from research he failed to cite:

“Unfortunately research shows that most universities are ineffective in fostering critical thinking. For example, in a three year study of 68 public and private colleges in California, though the overwhelming majority (89%) claimed critical thinking to be a primary objective of their instruction, only a small minority (19%) could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking is.”

I have to say my anecdotal perspective compares with this citation-less research.

Perhaps we need to just over simply our definition. Critical Thinking is a method of thinking that criticises or questions how and what we are thinking about. Again, simply reworded, by what authority do we know a belief or idea to be real or true. Sound familiar, we are talking about epistemology 101.

Now herein lays the danger of teaching kids to think critically. If we teach them to question intellectual authority won’t they begin questioning the teacher’s authority? And beyond that won’t they question the bias from which we think and teach from. By this I mean, in a Christian School we teach from the perspective or bias of our Biblical Worldview, won’t this come into question?

In our staff room discussion on this teacher brought up the authority of reason. If we can apply logic to any given topic or idea we should be able to find the answer. He then extolled the veracity of the Socratic Method laid out by Plato. We then proceeded to canonize his writings as close to inspired by God as we dared. Do reason and the Socratic logic determine the true test for questioning the authority of our beliefs? Again I can’t help myself, Wow, there is a lot that we have to critically think about. I am sorry about this but our conundrum will not easily be solved.

Do we really open this door to our students? What if we don’t and some bias, secular humanistic, professor at University opens the door to these questions? I have observed this in a young man recently. He grew up in a fine Christian home and attended a well known Christian school, not ours by the way. He was one of the most intelligent, articulate and sincere young men I have ever met. When I began to spend time with him he had already crossed over to a completely different set of beliefs. This genie in the bottle had been opened up to him by a group of science students, a professor and an influx of anti-creationism literature.  It started with embracing evolutionary principles then rejecting intelligent design. He became an atheist, albeit a moral and ethical atheist, but even this is now breaking down as any personal morality from his childhood has no really foundation.

Again, how we do this will take the wisdom of a Socrates or better yet the wisdom of God.  Please help me out. I want to include some of your thoughts on this next week. I received only one email last week from my favourite and frequent contributor Pat MacKesy. I would love to do a bit of a Skype discussion with several of our listeners. Please email your ideas or willingness to participate. Also if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.