On the front page of today's Denver Post is a story about the continuing controversy in Bennett over the teacher who showed the opera Faust to her elementary students. When the story continues inside, there is a sidebar with some background information about the opera itself. The reason for this post is the source of that background information - Wikipedia.org.
What does it mean when the Denver Post is citing Wikipedia as a source? The article on Faust (opera) was last edited on January 9th by the user "Phaunt", who describes himself as "Hi! My name is L�on Planken, I was born on 24 May 1979, and live in Delft, the Netherlands. Apart from here, I sometimes contribute to other Wikipedias."
I'm not saying the information in this article is incorrect, nor am I implying that "Phaunt" is unreliable. In fact, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia in general. But I really have no idea of the validity of this information - not being an expert on Faust myself, or knowing L�on personally. We've been talking a lot about having our students not believe everything they read on the Internet (or elsewhere), and investigating sources and verifying information. I'm thinking it may be a little bit difficult to convince them of the necessity of that if the Denver Post isn't doing it . . .
Should we be coming up with a more "formal" approach to teaching our students these skills?
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