Stop Telling Students Not to Use Wikipedia — Teach Them How

The Bengali version of this post is a translation of an opinion column originally published in English. Rather than translate it back, we summarise the argument here and point English readers to the original.

The argument, in short

Generations of students have been told to avoid Wikipedia because it is “unreliable”. That advice has not kept pace with the site. It made sense fifteen years ago, when a bad edit could sit unnoticed and readers were less practised at telling solid information from junk. It makes much less sense now: Wikipedia detects disruptive editing far better than it used to, hundreds of bots and more than a thousand administrators review changes as they happen, and in 2015 the project won the Erasmus Prize — the only institution, rather than individual, among its recipients.

The second objection is that Wikipedia makes research too easy, and that schools should not reward shortcuts. This misreads what the encyclopedia is for. Wikipedia was never meant to be the final word on a subject. It is a gateway: each article summarises a topic and then links out, through the references listed at the foot of every page, to the sources it rests on. Those references are the point.

Nothing here is perfect — material that should not be there does sometimes slip past. But the answer is to teach students how to follow a citation and judge whether a source holds up. In an era of misinformation that is a far more durable skill than looking away. Knowledge has never been this reachable; ignoring it is the real waste.

Original article: “Stop telling students not to use Wikipedia. Instead, teach them how.” by Bobb Knauft, published in The News Record. The Bengali text on this page is a translation of that column.