To use WikiPedia or Not?

To my surprise, I recently discovered that there seems to be great divide between those that support and those that do not support the use of Wikipedia. I become concerned when I see students using only one source such as Wikipedia or when I hear teachers tell their students not to use it. Wouldn't a practical approach teach our students to use multiple sources and evaluate each source for relevancy and accuracy? Isn't that what we did before we had a great wealth of information at our fingertips via the web? Further, when a student identifies an example of an inaccurate source is that not a powerful learning experience?

The web makes it easier to conduct research and provides our students with a great deal more of information than if they were physically confined to a library or classroom without the internet. Now, more than ever it is important to teach students the skills of evaluating sources of information. That is why information literacy is a 21st Century skill (see http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/infolit.htm). I think we need to get past hyping or discouraging the use of any one site or source and leave it up to the students to decide what is best, provided we do our job and teach them them the skills that they need.

Thanks to many Maine East teachers who have expressed their opinions on this topic during recent discussions and also to Scott Mcleod who writes about this topic in his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant (see http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2007/11/just-say-no-to.html).