Paging through a textbook in preparation for a class I’m teaching my eye caught a reference. I froze. Can this really be true? Is this really allowed in a textbook? The source is Wikipedia! Now don’t get me wrong, Wikipedia is a great quick reference and I use it often, but it is certainly not trustworthy source. No self-respecting scholar would be caught dead quoting Wikipedia.
Or have trustworthiness and factuality and truth so deteriorated in our postmodern zeitgeist that any source would do. Have facts just become opinions, and all opinions equal? Is the professor speaking about his field of expertise and the freshman speaking about the same field equally quotable sources?
Don’t get me wrong, I am a child of postmodernity, a Generation Xer par excellence; I feel strangely at home in this fragmented zeitgeist, but I also value the knowledgeable over the laity. All narratives are not equal.
1 comment:
Wikipedia is the number one source when students hand in assignments to me. I know that the language faculty discourages the use of Wikipedia as reference, but I get the impression that the other faculties don't really mind.
With regards to Wikipedia, the advice of one of our professors to us graduates were that we can use it as a starting point, but all information should be corroborated by other sources.
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