A cartoon done by Greg Williams. Williams uses Wikipedia info as his source material. Click the pic to see it full size.
When I was being trained to teach English at the University of Toronto, one of the instructors went out of her way to warn us against using Wikipedia, or worse, having our students use it. It perhaps goes without saying that she doesn’t use it herself and therefore doesn’t really know what is there. That’s the mental trap that Henry Jenkins was trying to delicately unlock in his recent lecture to educators, which can be read on his blog.
Fortunately, along with Henry, there are teachers and commentators and technologists who are busy working with Wikipedia and some examples of their work will show, I believe, that Wikipedia is a worthy pedagogical tool.
One of the best overviews for educators is Andy Carvin’s post on the PBS Teachers site, learning.now. Andy jumps into Wikipedia and is somewhat embarrassed to find an entry on himself. He can’t resist paraphrasing Groucho’s remark that “he isn’t too sure he wants to use an encyclopedia that has him in it!†But he does use it; he creates an entry for the Chinese activist and blogger, Hao Wu. Wikipedia keeps track of the history of each article; so, not only can you see the original entry written by Andy, but after a dozen other people add their contributions, you can see the current page on Wu. The result? Valuable current info that no single author could write and that, otherwise, would simply not exist.
Carvin’s demo illustrates the way Wikipedia was built up, article by article, to its current size of 2 million English entries. In addition to shorter articles, there are also complete books in its WikiBooks section and the subject range is almost as wide as the main Wiki, from Introduction to Paleoanthroplogy to Raising Chickens.
Whether book or article, it is the vast, sprawling content of Wikipedia that is the main attraction. But the way in which material is shown can also be interesting. One of the features of Wikipedia I didn’t know about is the Simple English Wikipedia, which provides articles on a wide range of topics and uses only simple words and ways of writing. It’s completely free to use, as with anything in Wikipedia. Here’s the entry for Animation:
Animation is a way of making a movie from many unmoving images. The images are put together one after another, and then played at a fast speed to give the appearance of movement. Most animations are played at a speed of sixteen to twenty-four images per second. Each image becomes one frame of the movie. The illusion of movement is caused because of persistence of vision.
(I’ve filtered out the links that some of the words have, links that would encourage new readers of English to explore further.)
Greg Williams has a unique way to display Wikipedia material; he turns selected entries into comic books a sample of which can be seen above. Less artisitic but just as creative are the programmers at the University of Leipzig who have decided to use Wikipedia as their data base; their DBPedia software scans the entire encyclopedia and can instantly tell you any number of things, from which intellectuals were influenced by Nietzsche to which pro tennis players come from Moscow or the names of all the TV sitcoms set in New York City. And to round out this quick sample of folks using Wikipedia to generate their own information, let’s not forget that Google Earth has a special link that ties Wikipedia information to geographical location and might help us locate Nietzsche’s home town or Moscow or NYC.
Another attraction to Wikipedia is the wide variety of ways the content can be accessed. If somehow you happen to be out in the real world and want to know something, you can tap into Wikipedia using SMS on your cell phone. Handy for cell phone addicts, I suppose. But, more realistically, you may be happily seated at home or in the library or office and require only a summary of info on some subject included in Wikipedia. LiteSum will do that for you. I typed in my own name and this came up:
Stephen Bingham was a defense attorney. He was tried and acquitted for his alleged role in Black Panther George Jackson’s attempted escape from San Quentin in 1971.
Litesum’s speed was almost instantaneous - frighteningly fast - and the information is true, it’s just not about me!
The ‘wrong’ info does bring up the issue of inaccuracy in Wikipedia. Because the encyclopedia is open to one and all, changes may appear faster than corrections can be made; some researchers have suggested a color-code system in which disputed areas of info would appear in one color while the agreed facts would appear in another. Whatever the value of this suggestion, it gets us back to George Siemens’ statement that Wikipedia is mostly useful as a source of “quick and dirty info.” Siemens is a supporter of the value of Wiki but he thinks the giant project will turn out to be a temporary stop gap. It will become impossible, Siemens says, for Wikipedia to continue growing and to also control the accuracy of the content. He favors some kind of ‘futurepedia’ that will use Google-type search and some as yet to be developed technology that will automatically and instantaneously locate disparate chunks of texts from different websites and blogs and synthesize them into one article. Wow. The info will emerge from our collective knowledge base.
But not this Christmas. And there’s something people-phobic in George’s implication that a Google algorithm could do it better than a group of interested humans.
I wondered about Litesum’s capability to solve the question that had originally proved to me the capability and speed of Wikipedia. That question was a silly one, you may remember:
What English noun in its plural form has none of the same letters used in its singular version?
It had taken me only 10 minutes on Wikipedia to find the answer: singular, cow / plural, kine. I imagined LiteSum kicking out the answer in nanoseconds. So I typed the question in and the answer immediately appeared:
No results found.
Whew. Still a place for us humans, with the rest of the cows…kine, that is.
