Students´attitudes concerning Wikipedia : quick facts or collaborative writing?

Source criticism is a strong challenge in higher education as many students do not pay sufficient attention to the diversity of sources, they want quick facts that they can reuse. By not being able to distinguish the quality of texts on the net, they clip and paste sentences that they collect in different documents. It is not possible to substitute academic learning with patch-writing strategies (Pecorari, 2015). Many students perceive themselves as illegitimate writers as they have to learn the content of the field as well as a more general academic practice on how to write an essay or formulate adequate answers to academic assignments (Eklund, Sköldvall, 2015). The case of Wikipedia is interesting as many students use this immediate information that they find on Internet (Tkacz, 2015). Wikipedia is a collaborative platform (O ́Sullivan, 2009) with many facts that students find it difficult to quote. Consequently, it is important to collect information on their attitudes to be able to see if there are any common strategies that students have. In order to define these strategies, it can be appropriate to ask students to work with Wikipedia articles and evaluate the information that they find. An experiment has been made in 2018 in a class of French as a foreign language at Stockholm University where students were asked to work with some articles of Wikipedia. Students had to learn basic facts by using the information contained in those pages. The inclusion of questions on sources was interesting to analyse students ́ attitudes. Some of them reacted vis-à-vis the content of the articles whereas other students commented the format of Wikipedia as a generic source for facts. In this perspective, the analysis of sources is the first step to acquire a mode of critical thinking in the Academy (Davies, 2013). The article aims at studying these reactions to see how the students in a foreign language might use and reflect about a source that they immediately meet when they look for empirical facts, figures or references on the Net. The results of this empirical investigation conducted during Spring 2018 will be presented. The second purpose would be to see whether students could possibly use collaborative strategies as learning tools (Kalin, 2012) in order to avoid plagiarism (Chankova, 2017). Should the Academy pay more attention to Wikipedia sources or consider them as a form of poor and quick knowledge? Are there any recommendations that can be delivered so that a better understanding of sources can help to avoid plagiarism? Last but not least, can this study based on quick facts be applied to formal knowledge?Pedagogical ambassador (2018 - CeUL