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Students seem to arrive in my rhetoric classes (RHE 306 and 309K so far) with a polarized understanding of how to use the internet's two most common research tools: Google and Wikipedia. They've either not been clued in (or at least pretend) that both resources are problematic in terms of reliability, or they've been told that both are the devil, to be avoided by any serious scholar.
As is so often the case, my main concern as an instructor is to get students to realize that the whole story is complex: the internet provides tools, and like traditional tools such as saws and hammers, they provide tremendous saved labor if used with caution and training, and, in much the same regard, have elevating sequences of consequences (e.g. inaccuracy, plagiarism, libel) when used carelessly or naively.
An exercise that points this out—I call it the “bad search” exercise—is to have students perform a Google search for Martin Luther King, Jr. (This specific example isn’t hugely important, as search results change and there are many instances of the kind of problem illustrated.) Depending on the day and the level of personalization software on each student’s computer, somewhere in the top ten (after the MLK Wikipedia page, of course) will appear “Martin Luther King: A True Historical Examination.” It appears at www.martinlutherking.org.
Many students have been taught that .org, which often reflects nonprofit status, reflexively grants reliability. So imagine their consternation to realize that they have, in this case, stumbled upon a libelous hate site hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist group. This fact isn’t apparent without some poking around on the page itself, so in all likelihood, some student somewhere has used this site as an informational source. Errors of this general category doubtless occur daily.
The takeaway point is that search engines are unmediated by human editors: they can save labor on the front end by amalgamating awesome sums of information, but can then restore it by causing users to misevaluate any given source, since it has typically not been vetted for accuracy.
The same applies to Wikipedia. We want students to consider that group editing, while reasonably reliable, lends itself to all manner of exceptions ranging from deliberate spoofs and hoaxes to idiosyncratic fan pages. A “bad search” exercise that provides working examples of the latter are searches for pages devoted to pro wrestlers: while they’ve gotten better since I started performing this exercise, they still weave “in-universe” narratives into attempts at legitimate biography, making it near-impossible for students to figure out which events occurred historically and which as part of the scripted wrestling narrative.
And yet, virtually every major Wikipedia article features a long list of references representing a great deal of embedded labor to pool information on a given topic in one place. Many of these references themselves link to reliable articles, and so Wikipedia is actually ideal as a place to get started. Even if the articles themselves are not academically viable resources, we need not reinvent the wheel by beginning searches from scratch.
This loops us back, recursively, to the problem outlined at the outset: how do we get students themselves to evaluate individual sources, like those found using Google, such as might be found in the Wikipedia article reference list? It’s a much harder task than saying “Wikipedia and Google bad” or that of unconditional endorsement of the internet as a labor-saving tool. Use of academic databases is one way of screening in advance, of course, but is still a kind of argument from external authority that merely repackages the problem of evaluation for credibility.
The simplest answer is to teach students to evaluate all sources both internally and contextually, and to view quick internet seraches with healthy ambivalence. Teaching that, however, takes longer than a day.
