Before I started reading, I remembered back in high school when teachers would tell us that we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source for papers because it wasn't "trustworthy" enough. We were told that people always hack into Wikipedia and put fake pages on there. This concern was addressed immediately in Chapter 4. "If anyone can edit anything on the site any time they want, how in the world can you trust what you read there" (56). As a teacher, I know that I will encourage students to use Wikipedia, even with this concern. However, as it explained in the book, most people get the "pedia" part of Wikipedia, which is just the encyclopedia. Most don't know what the "wiki" means. With this said, I would like to teach my students the benefits of using Wikipedia as a source of information, as well as what Wikipedia is, and why people can break into Wikipedia to create false pages but how it is easily fixed.
As a teacher, it is important for me to go through the pages beforehand to get a feel for what the students are reading. If it doesn't sound or isn't correct, either don't allow students to use that page or share my results and show that you can't trust everything on the internet.
Knowing that the internet does in fact allow fake pages and information is scary and dangerous; however, it is important to take action against using pages that don't sound right.
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