The Information Environment class I am studying (CSU ETL501) asks its students —
What is your opinion of Wikipedia? Should TLs encourage students to use it with care or should they advise students against using Wikipedia? What is your experience of using Wikipedia in terms of its realibility and accuracy?
Oh dear, here is where I have to confess that Wikipedia is one of my best friends. I have my trusty little laptop near the sofa and as we watch TV and wonder about things, we cruise Wikipedia for background information. It could be anything from Doctor Who directors to the name of the capital city of the Yukon territory.
Having said that, researching topics for academics is a different story. I still encourage students to use it (they will anyway so no point in trying to discourage it), it is an excellent starting place.
As a TL in a primary school, I find the information the 2/3/4 classes go to Wikipedia is general knowledge. Most of them will not end up using the information from Wiki at that age independently, the reading level is too high for them (eg. spiders). But from this age I let them try as the searching is good practice and I point out the hyperlinks at the bottom of the articles as possible places to search for more information. At this age books are still the best.
I read an article ’somewhere’ (lost in my saved bookmarks) about print encyclopedias and their role in teaching the organization of information (topics and subheadings etc) and that online resources full of hyperlinks in fact work against that organisational development. It made me look again at the presented projects and sure enough children who had relied exclusively on web sites seemed to have a lot less organization to their finished products (anecdotal evidence only, maybe no correlation at all, but I always take note now). But I stray (like a hyperlink 
)
With the grade 5/6 students I encourage them to look at the fascinating stuff going on on the discussion page of whatever the topic is that they are researching. It’s a whole other world ‘backstage’ with raging debates, nitpicking and colossal feats of collaboration. Information comes alive then. They see that learning is not some cut and paste activity, the answers they were looking for are not black and white. Many of our best discussions about the reliability of information have come from those pages. Take a peek! Here’s a link to the discussion page of stort story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges which I think was mentioned in our study guide - clickhere
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