Help This Kitty

There's a disease on campus, and it's spreading. It's spreading right now off campus and indeed throughout the world. Symptoms include wild outbursts of derision, thinly veiled hostility and refusal to acknowledge alternative viewpoints. What's the name of this diabolical disease you say? For lack of a better snarky name, I'm going to go with wiki-phobia.

Wiki-phobia (n)- The irrational hatred of wikipedia, as conveyed to your helpless students, while preaching the advantages of trekking to a library to discover facts out of a physically worn-out book written by a bunch of old white guys with a limited viewpoint of the world.

I'm no utopian, I am quite aware of the dangers of relying on just one source, including wikipedia. Why is it however, that we are willing to over-emphasize the flaws of new media approaches like that of wikipedia and not the flaws of old media.

Professors are losing a crucial opportunity to make their students aware of the flaws inherent in any form of human recording of the world around them and collective history. Instead, most professors' commentary on the subject of sourcing consists of: "Scholarly Sources Good! Wikipedia evil, bad, dogpoop!"

It's quite amusing really, seeing how full of themselves most of my professors seem to be. Forgive my use of language, but I've spent four years in an educational facility telling me that you cannot contribute to history if you don't have a degree. I'm a first generation American, 1st generation to graduate high school and 1st generation to attend college.

I didn't magically appear on campus one day. The skills I learned from my mother and grandmother got me to this point, and their knowledge and input about the world and history made it possible to be where I am today. If we're going to educate about being aware of your sources, then let's do it, but targeting one medium of knowledge is counter-productive to the goals of an educational institution.