It is 1804, and Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton is lying on the ground near a riverbank, wounded and helpless. Towering above Hamilton with a pistol in his hand is Vice President Aaron Burr, his index finger resting on the gun's metallic trigger. From somewhere to the side, a man named Benjamin Franklin says the only two words of encouragement Burr needs to hear: "Finish him."
That's the story Wikipedia.org told when Assistant Professor of History Benjamin Carp looked up the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr last week.
"It helps to know that Franklin was dead by that time, so it would have been an impossible situation," Carp said.
The entry, which has since been changed, is just one of many inaccuracies that recently spurred the history department at Middlebury College to institute a ban on the citation of Wikipedia entries in academic papers, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Though professors at Middlebury say the ban is necessary to hold students accountable for the accuracy of their information, reactions in the Tufts history department are mixed.
According to Carp, while he personally doesn't allow students to use Wikipedia, he doesn't support banning it completely.
"A blanket ban doesn't really make sense, because students are going to look at it anyway," Carp said. "In accordance with plagiarism rules, you have to say where you're citing info from in the first place, and I can tell you that Wikipedia is not going to look good in a college-level paper."
Another colleague of Carp's in the history department, Professor Howard Malchow, agreed.
"You see [Wikipedia] increasingly cited as a source in footnotes and bibliography," Malchow said. "My advice to students is that I don't want to see it cited as a source, because I don't want them to rely on it like they would rely on a peer-reviewed journal or a book."
According to Carp, Wikipedia is okay for some assignments, but not for others. He cites a recent assignment he gave students in his Civil War class about the letters of Abraham Lincoln as an example.
"The point of that assignment is for students to first look at the letters themselves and come up with their own reactions, and for that part of the assignment they can look on the Internet if they see people or events they haven't heard of," Carp said.
"But for the second part of the assignment, they have to use secondary sources to find out what scholars have written about the events they're reading about," he continued. "For that, the use of Wikipedia is not appropriate, because you need to be sure you have an accurate source."
Malchow felt similarly.
"It's a popular knowledge compilation that, as a scholar, would be dangerous to rely on," Malchow said. "However, as a first step - as you're beginning some research or for basic knowledge that you're not going to assume is necessarily accurate - it can be incredibly convenient. I use it myself sometimes as a starting point."
"I don't deny that it's a useful tool," he said. "I just don't think it's a scholarly tool."
For Associate Professor Gary Leupp, however, Wikipedia has value as more than just a background source. He said stopping students from using it would be counter-productive.
"I think [a ban on Wikipedia] is irrational," Leupp said. "It's important to inculcate a critical sense in students about any kind of source."
According to Leupp, no source is truly credible. To him, choosing which information to believe is what learning is all about.
"Students have a tendency to read a book by one fallible human being, and then to say, 'Well in the book they said ...' They - as if it were a committee," Leupp said. "Students often revere sources in a way, but they are written by individuals."
"Students should disagree with and doubt parts of anything they read," he continued. "It's all part of the critical reasoning faculties you want to develop in a history class."
According to Leupp, while Wikipedia is not an ideal source to cite, it should not be ruled out as an option.
"It may be that a person doesn't have another reference for a piece of information that is necessary and important," he said. "In that case, is it better to not footnote at all, or to cite Wikipedia?"
Though Malchow said he sees the value of Wikipedia as a first resource, he said the problems with its accuracy often undermine the credibility of facts listed there.
"There is no guarantee that the information there is accurate," Malchow said. "For example, there's been a lot of controversy lately about people putting stuff into Wikipedia that is ideologically driven."
Leupp acknowledged that Wikipedia contains many inaccuracies, but said it's all part of the learning process.
"Just today, I was talking to my class about a Japanese shogun who ruled the country in the 17th century," Leupp said. "Wikipedia had him down as mentally retarded, but he was in fact a brilliant scholar who may have had a mental disorder."
Leupp said he pointed the error out to his students, but that it doesn't mean they shouldn't reference the entry.
"I [mentioned the error] thinking maybe they would reference Wikipedia for this guy, and I didn't want to discourage them from doing that," he said. "There's a lot of valid information to be procured from Wikipedia, and in my opinion it's helpful so long as you know that anybody can contribute, and take what you read there with a grain of salt."
