Once said can not be unsaid

There are many places where people can publish text and multimedia content on the internet. There are many places where this can be done for free. Examples of this include blogger, myspace, youtube, flickr, zoomr and wikispaces. The list of places like this is extensive and growing rapidly.

This means that young people can say and publish things very easily, on impulse and without due consideration to the consequences. Sometimes things can be said that are regretted later. It is a simple thing to go to the website and remove the material which is now causing embarrassment but the problem is that evidence still remains in the databases of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Some time after content is placed on a web site Google and Yahoo robots check the material out and put key words into their database along with key phrases. These words and phrases continue to appear when using search engines long after the offensive material has been removed from the actual website. So even after the material has been removed, the words remain for quite some time.

What are some things we as parents might do to help our children with this?

How should students use Wikipedia?

Before we can say how they should use it, perhaps we need to ask if it is OK to use it.

Can we trust Wikipedia?

There have been a couple of independent studies looking at the accuracy of Wikipedia. There was one in 2005 that involved a survey by the science journal ‘Nature’. They found that the science entries in the volunteer written, online encyclopedia Wikipedia were "not markedly less accurate" than those found in Encyclopaedia Britannica. More recently, Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems, found that experts rate articles in their sphere of expertise more highly than non-experts in the filed do.

One of the features of Wikipedia is that it is peer published. Anyone can help with creating content and so it is created very quickly and kept up to date. It is a case of many hands making light work. This would be extremely difficult to do using the old traditional methods. A good recent example of this is the documentation of the ‘Virginia Tech massacre’. This event occurred on 16^th April and it was also on 16^th April that a page in Wikipedia was created. Go and have a look at it now.

How should students and teachers use Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research

• Be aware that sometimes people insert wrong information but it is generally cleaned up quickly.

• You should always check a second source and usually Wikipedia will tell you where to find other sources

• Where there might be some question of the accuracy of a page, Wikipedia will usually highlight that. Going to the discussion link for that page will help understand the dispute and is often very informative.