Aussie high schoolers get Wikipedia course

In an Australian first, NSW high school students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.

Wikipedia, which ranks among the world's top-10 most visited sites, has been listed by the NSW Board of Studies as prescribed text for an elective course in the English syllabus for 2009-2012.

The website is one of a number of "texts" - a choice that also includes a book and a movie - which students can choose to study in an elective called the Global Village, a course examining how the world's communities communicate and interact.

Don Cater, the English inspector at the Board of Studies, said the course was intended to teach students skills of analysis to enable them to be more discerning about content they found on the web.

"It was felt that Wikipedia reflected notions of the global village; that fluidity, of being up to date and changing in a way that other websites don't do," he said in explaining the reasons behind the choice.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now available in 253 languages and attracts about 700 million visitors annually. The English editon alone contains nearly 2.5 million articles.

Wikipedia is maintained by volunteers from all over the world and anyone with an internet connection can create and edit articles and publish them on the site.

However, because the site allows authors and editors to use pseudonyms, the system is open to abuse, vandalism and a selective telling of history that reflects an author's bias.

Greg Black, the CEO of education.au, a not-for-profit educational training organisation run jointly by the Federal Government and the education sector, has welcomed the decision.

He said it marked the first time in Australia that the study of Wikipedia had been formally included in a syllabus.

"The reality is that, with one click of a mouse, you can get information from anywhere at any time around the world, which is fantastic," he said.

"But what the kids really need to learn about is whether it's fit for purpose, the context, the relevance, whether there's an alternative view - an understanding about how to use information in an effective way."

Mr Black, whose organisation brought Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to Australia on a speaking engagement last year, said it was only in the past couple of years that schools and education systems were coming to terms with how to use the internet in a systematic way.

He said that children were using the internet not just for study purposes but increasingly for all manner of social and recreational activities.

"The reality is that schools and schools systems are going to have to engage with this whether they like it or not."

The move was also welcomed by a local Wikipedia editor who writes under the pen name name of Privatemusing.

A long-time volunteer Wikipedia editor and a member of its soon-to-be formed local chapter, he said that the best way to learn about new media such as Wikipedia was to "plug in".

Wikipedia should be seen as a first port of call that can "point you in the direction of more authoritative resources".

"Because of that, I have high hopes that it will be a very valuable experience for high school students," he said, one that would expose them to the "good, bad and ugly sides" of Wikipedia.

- © Fairfax NZ News