Founder says teachers should let students use Wikipedia for research

Wikipedia boss, Jimmy Wales, has dubbed teachers who don’t allow their students to use Wikipedia for research “bad educators”.

Wales said he felt the standard of editing and citation on Wikipedia has improved since the controversy regarding the validity of the information on the site came to a head in 2005. He also saiddidn’t see why teachers had a problem with students citing Wikipedia as a source as long as the article has accurate and adequate citations itself.

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Many teachers said that lazy students had taken to copying information from Wikipedia and so have banned students from using it.

In 2005, Jimmy Wales himself said anyone who copies content from Wikipedia for an essay or project deserved to fail because the information was only meant to be used as a stepping-stone for research.

Wales said that the editing of information on the site has since improved and that the introduction of a real-time peer review system means that articles, which are deemed to be biased or inaccurate, are quickly caught by volunteers.

We still say you should get up off your behind and look it up in a book or trawl through the Google results yourself, but that’s just us.