A Workbook for Arguments

Objective: To help you understand what makes a source authoritative, and to help you evaluate how authoritative Wikipedia can be.

Instructions: Imagine that you are going to create a competitor to Wikipedia. That is, you are going to create an online encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. Create a list of five to ten rules that all contributors must follow to ensure that the articles in your encyclopedia are as authoritative as possible—that is, that readers would be justified in relying on your encyclopedia for information. After you have generated your list of rules, review this summary of Wikipedia's guidelines for contributors. How do your rules differ from Wikipedia's? In what ways are your rules better? In what ways are Wikipedia's better?

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be a list of five to ten rules for contributors to your online encyclopedia, along with a few paragraphs explaining and evaluating the differences between your rules and Wikipedia's.

Objective: To help you understand what counts as a "reliable source" on Wikipedia and evaluate how much trust you should put in information on Wikipedia.

Instructions: Review Wikipedia's guidelines for what counts as a "reliable source" of information. Keeping in mind the rules from Chapter IV of A Workbook for Arguments, explain how following Wikipedia's guidelines ensures—or fails to ensure—that Wikipedia's contributors are using sources widely. Does reading these rules increase or decrease your trust in the claims on Wikipedia that are supported by outside sources? Why?

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be a few paragraphs answering the questions posed in the instructions.

Objective: To help you identify potential flaws in Wikipedia.

Instructions: Review this summary of Wikipedia's guidelines for contributors. Identify one change that you think Wikipedia could make that would increase the site's trustworthiness. (This should not be a change that transforms Wikipedia into an "ordinary" encyclopedia—that is, into an encyclopedia authored exclusively by experts.) Explain your suggested change and write a brief paragraph explaining how your change would improve Wikipedia's trustworthiness.

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be one specific change that Wikipedia could make the guidelines on this page, along with a paragraph or two explaining how that change would improve Wikipedia's trustworthiness.

Objective: To collect empirical evidence about the reliability and quality of Wikipedia articles.

Instructions: Follow these steps to complete this activity:

1. Pick a topic about which (a) you know a great deal, and (b) Wikipedia has an article that is at least two paragraphs long.
2. Read the article carefully, making a note of (a) factual errors in the article, (b) biased or misleading claims in the article, and (c) important information that is omitted from the article.
3. Based on your work in Step 2, rate the article's accuracy from 1 to 10 (with one being "highly inaccurate" and ten being "entirely accurate"). Then, rate the article's informativeness from 1 to 10 (with one being "not at all informative" and ten being "extremely informative").
4. As a class, combine everyone's ratings from Step 3 to find the average ratings for accuracy and informativeness. Also, add up the total number of inaccurate claims, misleading claims, and important omissions to find the average number of errors and omissions in each article.
5. (Optional) After completing Step 4, your class will have collectively constructed an argument for some conclusion about how trustworthy and informative Wikipedia is. If you have read Chapter II from A Workbook from Arguments, write a paragraph evaluating how strong this argument is. Be sure to consider the number of articles that your class has surveyed, the representativeness of those articles, the use of statistics in this activity, etc.

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be a list of factual errors, misleading statements, and important omissions in your chosen article, along with your ratings of your article's accuracy and informativeness. The class should also end up with a set of statistics about the Wikipedia articles that your class surveyed. If you completed the optional Step 5, you should also have a paragraph or two evaluating the argument that your class collectively constructed about Wikipedia.

Objective: To help you evaluate the trustworthiness of Wikipedia and its competitor, Conservapedia.

Instructions: Concerned that Wikipedia has a liberal bias, some conservatives started a competitor called Conservapedia, which is intentionally written "from a conservative viewpoint." Conservapedia bills itself as "the trustworthy encyclopedia." Read through several articles on both Wikipedia and Conservapedia, including articles about the same topic. Review both Wikipedia's guidelines and Conservapedia's guidelines for contributors. You might also read Wikipedia's article on conservatism and Conservapedia's article on liberalism, as well as Conservapedia's article about Wikipedia and Wikipedia's article on Conservapedia.

After you have spent a fair amount of time studying both sites, decide which site you think is more trustworthy. Write about one page arguing for your conclusion, drawing on specific observations from your study of both sites.

Final Product: The final product of this activity is an argument, about one page in length, for a conclusion about which of the two sites—Conservapedia or Wikipedia—is more reliable.

Objective: To give you practice identifying claims that can and should be supported up by authoritative sources.

Instructions: Wikipedia allows users to tag claims in any article with a [citation needed] marker. Follow these steps to add three such tags to appropriate claims in Wikipedia:

1. If you don't have one, create a free account on Wikipedia. If you have an account already, log into your account.
2. Browse Wikipedia articles on topics that interest you, looking for three claims that can and should be supported by an authoritative reference, but which for which no source is currently given. (If you're having trouble finding appropriate articles, the articles on this list are likely to need citations.)
3. When you find a claim that can and should be supported by an authoritative reference, check to make sure that you are logged in. Then, edit the Wikipedia page to add a [citation needed] tag after the claim. (Wikipedia offers general instructions for editing Wikipedia pages and detailed instructions for adding [citation needed] tags.)
4. Go to the My Contributions page for your account by clicking on the "My Contributions" link in the top right of any Wikipedia page. (You will have to be logged in to see this link.) Print out your "My Contributions" page and highlight the pages to which you added [citation needed] tags.

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be one to three Wikipedia articles to which you have added [citation needed] tags. (You should have added three [citation needed] tags total.) The final product will also include a print out of your "My Contributions" page indicating which pages you have edited.

Objective: To give you practice identifying authoritative sources of information.

Instructions: Wikipedia allows users to tag claims in any article with a [citation needed] marker. Follow the steps below to replace three of those [citation needed] tags with references to authoritative sources:

1. If you don't have one, create a free account on Wikipedia. If you have an account already, log into your account.
2. Go to Wikipedia's of all articles that have one or more statements tagged as needing citations. Find several articles on that list that are on topics of interest to you.
3. For each article, identify the claims that have been tagged as needing citations. (You can do this quickly by going to Edit > Find in your web browser and typing in "citation needed.")
4. After checking to ensure that you are logged into your account, edit the Wikipedia articles to replace at least three of [citation needed] tags with references to reliable sources. (Wikipedia offers general instructions for editing Wikipedia pages and instructions for adding references.) Be sure to keep in mind both the rules from Chapter IV of A Workbook for Arguments and Wikipedia's own guidelines for identifying reliable sources.
5. Go to the My Contributions page for your account by clicking on the "My Contributions" link in the top right of any Wikipedia page. (You will have to be logged in to see this link.) Print out your "My Contributions" page and highlight the pages to which you added citations.

Final Product: The final product of this activity should be one to three Wikipedia articles on which you have replaced a [citation needed] tag with a reference to an authoritative source, along with a print out of your "My Contributions" page indicating which pages you have edited.