(Infographic World, 2014)

My initial knee-jerk reaction to this question was a distinct and firm…NO!  I clearly recall having a former student gleefully chortle about how he had gone on to Wikipedia and changed something to make it completely irrelevant and absurd while researching information for his science class. (This after I had sternly admonished my classes to NOT use Wikipedia as a reliable source for their papers!) I was completely aghast and was unfortunately not surprised that he had done something like this (yes, you would not want to meet this student anywhere ever…shivers still just thinking about him)

However, that was over 10 years ago.  Today is a new day, 2019, and Wikipedia is much improved and stricter with their policies so that kind of irreverence is quickly and succinctly removed.

After looking at the Wikipedia Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool I was very impressed and actually began to change my mind as I perused potential valid uses for teachers and students at the university level.  I’m not so sure it would work at the middle school level, which is what I currently teach, although the students may be able to handle the assignment regarding adding illustrations to an article. My students are very adept at taking pictures and video.  After I had done the assignment for this class on making a multimedia book trailer and showed them one on the book, Monster, that we are reading, they wished they could use more multimedia tools to make book reports. I believe that this would be a big hit and thinking further on it, could see designing a lesson, including a field trip, around the author, Avi, since he lived in Providence at one time, and I checked and there are no pictures of his home in Providence? We could also check out other historical buildings and or streets that other famous authors lived on and bring this whole project full circle with a bulletin board display outside of the library with the pictures and novels they are associated with, and links on the school and library website to showcase their work.  also have them explain the detailed planning and thought process regarding their assignments.

Another aspect of working on the illustrations for Wikipedia that has me intrigued is, “created videos that demonstrated audiovisually what articles describe in words.” ( Wikimedia Foundation, 2013, p.4) We know that not everyone learns in the same way and that pictures are a way to describe something without words, so anyone in any language,  and for the most part of any age as long as they have the correct reference point,  can understand it’s meaning. For many people, having that audiovisual aid is crucial to their learning and may even be essential.   In fact, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. And it’s more accustomed to processing images—ninety percent of the information sent to the brain is visual, and 93% of all human communication is visual.”  Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/visual-marketing-pictures-worth-60000-words-01126256 I can also see that this would be very beneficial for those students who are English Language Learners.