Help: FAQs/Schools

This FAQ page addresses some questions that teachers and school administrators may have about the information content on Wikipedia, and the use of Wikipedia by students.

Being the most widely used virtual encyclopedia, Wikipedia will certainly find a way to be useful for school activities. It could be fair to say that public domain encyclopedias will at least become permanent and perhaps specialized tools of the educational landscape.

There are a number of questions that often arise about the role that a public domain encyclopedia can play in regulated education. Concepts such as public domain, copyleft, and voluntary contributions to benefit society can be unique ideas of their gender in the educational framework. With Wikipedia, educators can investigate new educational concepts based on solidarity, mutual support and cooperative work.

Here are some questions that students or educators are usually asked about Wikipedia. The answers are based on both the current situation of Wikipedia and the expectations we have for the immediate future.

It usually is. Wikipedia is developing rapidly, which constantly improves its reliability as an encyclopedia. As it grows, it offers its readers more topics and more detailed. Their collaborators are constantly comparing what they read with what they know, and correct or expand the articles accordingly, gradually increasing their accuracy and depth. In addition, the initial texts are often transcription or translation of other free encyclopedias or public domain sources, already debushed origin that then update successive editors.

All this discourse is based on an optimistic and hopeful attitude, but it can also happen that the encyclopedia shelters a lot of wrong information, especially on those topics where there are not many people who know a lot - who are the most interesting to learn-, consolidating mistaken concepts through their dissemination, since anyone can put the information that he considers correct.

Nothing, at this time, anyone could go to almost any page and modify it by introducing incorrect information, and even creating a new article whose contents are nothing but lies or half truths.

However, that information probably does not remain in Wikipedia too long. Multi-users track the lists of contributions (especially those in controversial articles) and quickly delete or reverse the contributions that are evidently wrong. On the one hand, many users check the recent changes, especially those of anonymous users; on the other hand, registered users have a "Follow-up list" in which the modifications of the articles that the user has previously selected are recorded. It is common for an article to be found in the “Follow-up List” of several contributors. If an anonymous user or a relatively new user changes any data without justifying it, it is very likely that it causes alarm.

But Wikipedia can't be perfect. Almost certainly you can say that there is incorrect information in our contents, somewhere that has not yet been discovered. Therefore, if you are using Wikipedia for research or for a school job, always. You should verify the information by contrasting it with some other resource, as should be done with any other source.

Wiki It is a word of the Hawaiian language, which means ‘fast’. Some educators ask if the word Wiki is related to Wicca religion. Of course there is no relationship between both terms. A wiki is a kind of website that allows it to be edited collaboratively by various users. For more information, please refer to the article Wiki.

It depends on the teacher's criteria. The best bibliographical reference policy in any text is to have more than one reference resource. Wikipedia can be an excellent place to start looking for information. Teachers could ask the students what they did to verify the information they consulted in Wikipedia. Through search engines such as Google, students can easily compare Wikipedia content with information from other educational websites. Students can also compare the information in the Wikipedia version in a language with the information in another Wikipedia version, as well as can be compared with other encyclopedias such as the Free Encyclopedia or books. In addition, most of our best articles have sections such as “references”, “visit bibliography” or “external links” that normally contain information that allows access to more sources.

When the student wishes to know the authorship of the articles, he can address the "historic" of the article, where the links to the pages of the users who have contributed to it are collected. The history can also compare the different inputs in order to know who has contributed to certain parts of the article. In addition, there is a record of the contributions of each user accessible from a link on the particular page of each user. Each user, in addition to having their personal page where they can expose their preferences or show up to the community, has a personal discussion page where you can leave messages. These functions can be used by students to communicate with any user. In addition, if the student registers, you can send an e-mail to other users via a link in the side button.

Wikipedia has similar security issues equal to other open environments. Participation in Wikipedia requires young people to know basic Internet security practices (which they should already know). Wikipedia has the advantage that most of the communication is done in an open, public, reviewable way (even personal messages from the "discussion" page can be read by anyone). However, children and parents must understand that anyone regardless of their good or bad faith is free to participate in the project. While some children-centred online communities will eliminate members who are suspected of being dangerous to children in the real world; Wikipedia will not eliminate members based on its external activities (in spite of the legality or morality of those activities). Nor will it eliminate people based on their expressed view, despite how offensive or harmful they may be (as pedophilia advocates, who are allowed to participate in Wikipedia). Therefore, no child should ever assume the fact that someone who has an account in Wikipedia means they are safe to meet it in person. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and not a social environment to make friends "offline".

Wikipedia is not censored. It contains articles on topics such as racial slander, controversial political groups and movements, and sexual acts. Pages that are normally appropriate for the use of children may occasionally be vandalized with indecent words or content that may be offensive. Vandalism is usually detected and eliminated in a few minutes—if not seconds—but it is also possible for a person to access a page before vandalism is reversed. In addition, the articles on controversial topics describe everything that is necessary to know about them, without omitting or euphemistically presenting any information that might be uncomfortable for someone. Teachers must supervise children in Wikipedia, just as they would in any other online environment. Despite the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection is a specific selection of 2000 items suitable for school children and has been verified and edited for this audience. It contains approximately the content equivalent to 5000 pages of books with emphasis on Geography and Science. This is also available as a free download for use by schools.

Open source material is a type of information produced by open groups of developers where anyone who wants to use the information. Open-source production arose among software engineers with Linux production, an open-source computer operating system. MediaWiki is an open source software that supports an open source encyclopedia.

Open source production depends on qualified users to keep a collection constantly improving, whether it is an open collection of computer code or encyclopedic information. Open source collections typically maintain backup resources, so if a developer accidentally damages the code or content, it can be easily reversed to a previous stable version. The same backup system provides protection against malicious damage to an open source project.

A few surveys have developed reliable answers to why people contribute with open-source jobs like Wikipedia. Some kind of public interest or community spirit is often part of the motive. Open-source projects offer an opportunity to contribute to something that has a lasting value and will continue to grow. Open-source publication allows writers and software developers to apply their skills outside the strictly business environment. Casual writers and editors sometimes participate as a hobby or as a learning experience.

• Most of the students who participate most likely will be involved in interactive online activities. Student participation in Wikipedia can provide teachers with an opportunity to examine the knowledge they have about virtual security (online safety). Educators can use Wikipedia to teach how to mature their Critical sense which is essential when browsing and searching for information online.

• Wikipedia also allows teachers to discuss concept of public domain: your practical applications, your possibilities, your restrictions...

• Work in Wikipedia is an opportunity participate in an open community which is based on mutual respect and cooperation, but which is not related to any authoritarian figure that may provoke rejection of young people. By further deepening it, we could discuss whether or not there are authoritarian figures in Wikipedia and whether it would be possible to limit them even more: the message that 'we can build it'. In this sense, certain conventions and policies of Wikipedia may be understood as mere impositions and this perception is contrary to what Wikipedia wants to be. The controversial issue of policy in the name of toponyms with co-official languages is a good example.

• Writing articles in Wikipedia is an opportunity learning to participate in a collective drafting process. Wikipedia facilitates young people to investigate, compile and publish articles that will be collectively corrected.

• Those students who work with the imagesYou can. improve your criteria for selecting or creating them. This makes it easy for them to know what the market will require a photographer or a graphic designer.

• In Wikipedia constantly train the skills of writing, translating and drawing on any encyclopedic matter. This makes it easier for your users develop and improve your own style.

• Wikipedia is a great opportunity to work concept of encyclopedic knowledge - how it is built-, and to work the criterion in assessing the relevance of the information.

• It is also a great opportunity to experiment with a new form of presentation of ideas through hypertext: we move from oral language, whose content could only be replicated through memorization, with the great limitation that this supposes, to the written languagewhich presents no difficulty in its replication, but yes in understanding, contextualization, search for the relevant... language in hypertext and Internetwhere memorization and search are no longer a problem, but they are: the criterion, the context, the relevance, and, above all, the mix of formulations with different reference systems. New challenges to education.

Yeah. Wikipedia and other Wiki projects work thanks to the MediaWiki IT application, which was created under the GNU GPL license. This license implies that any person is authorized to use such application. This requires someone with the necessary knowledge that you can install MediaWiki on a server and put it into operation.

Access to a Wiki database can be protected by using a password, thus limiting access to editing your material to those members of the project. Passwords allow a Wiki to be a work base for an academic club, a group of teachers, a group of schools or any entity within the educational community. The MediaWiki database could be used to include school historians, to create academic content for a class project or to, even, create alternatives or supplements to textbooks. A Wiki project can work both on the internet and on a local computer network.

Visit Wikipedia:About for more information about Wikipedia, or visit our Wikipedia:Café. You can also check the FAQ list.

Yes, there is a project called Gleducar that uses the MediaWiki system to share content and teaching materials between teachers. It is also intimately related to Wikipedia through interwikis.

The aim of this project is to use the cooperative knowledge building paradigm, using free software, in the field of education.