Education through Wikipedia

The following was a comment I wrote in Future of the Book, in the post Rosenzweig on Wikipedia.

While some people think that finding an error in Wikipedia is a sign of its weakness, I am reassured that this is Wikipedia’s greatest strength.

I found this quote in the essay particularly interesting:

The limited audience for subscription-based historical resources such as American National Biography Online becomes an even larger issue when we move outside the borders of the United States and especially into poorer parts of the world, where such subscription fees pose major problems even for libraries.

I was reminded that you do not have to look outside of the United States to find poor people in dire need of a credible knowledge base. There are many poor people in the United States who do not always have access to American National Biography.

For about two decades Jonathan Kozol has been reminding us of the injustice that still exists in America’s education system. I think it’s important to not idealize today’s great wealth of knowledge, since access if often limited to the wealthy or academics. The potential service that Wikipedia will be providing in sharing knowledge to less fortunate is enormous, especially when considering where many people are starting from.

I found the following quotes in a press release by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) particularly concerning.

Why do students in our public schools not know that the Berlin Wall has fallen? Or that Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and elected to lead South Africa? Why do they think Ronald Reagan is still President? Or that there are Soviet troops in Afghanistan and not U.S. troops? Why do their science books still brag that one day scientists will decode the human genome?

All across the nation, students are forced to use books that have long been out of date. In Fall of 2000, the Utah Education Association found elementary schools using maps from 1950 and encyclopedias from 1966. In Oregon’s largest school district, students regularly use the same books, maps, and globes that their predecessors used more than 15 years ago. In Texas, teachers scramble to create their own worksheets and labs because their textbooks do not cover the material mandated by the new state curriculum standards. In California, students read books that devote entire chapters to countries that no longer exist. In Omaha, teachers can’t assign homework because there are not enough books for each student to take home. And in New York City, many of the books are older than some of the teachers.

Sadly, Wikipedia, with all its mistakes, is often the most accurate source of information for many people, even within the United States. It’s the role of the educated to support this infrastructure to ensure that information that millions will rely on is as credible as possible.