Wikipedia as a media object
It’s interesting that students are being taught not to use Wikipedia for research (my 7th grader, collage undergraduates) yet, because it’s “not reliable.” I have issues with this because a) I’m not sure that something published in a print book is necessarily more reliable, b) wikipedia is a more democratic collection of information than a published book would typically be (wikipedia has its own hierarchy, but still) c) students are using it any way.
The thing to do as an instructor would be to teach students how to use Wikipedia, but in order to do that we would need to understand it better ourselves.
Here’s an interesting document toward that end: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/iraq-war-wikihistoriography/
It is the "The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs" a twelve-volume printed set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war over a period of time. This document tells a kind of history of the war through the edits, revisions, and vandalism that took place on Wikipedia, including the “talk” page comments explaining the edits.
Some questions for class discussion: How can a Wikipedia page, even a “non-objective” provide a primary source in the public understanding of an event? How does the publication of this ephemeral digital text into a print document transform its status as “reliable” information?