‘Wikipedia in het geschiedenisonderwijs – weren of implementeren?’

Abstract

Wikipedia is an open-access and crowd-sourced Web 2.0 platform. Since its arrival, traditional historians have been critical about Wikipedia; they argue that acquiring soundness-of-knowledge has been made impossible due to the participatory historical culture that Wikipedia is built on. This negative view on Wikipedia will be refuted as the results from the literature study in this master thesis show that there are firm rules and regulations that need to be followed in the Wikipedia community to ensure the soundness-of-knowledge. Aside from the literature review, the results from the empirical study show that history teachers, teaching in the final years of havo-vwo education, are no longer excluding Wikipedia, rather, incorporating the platform in their history lessons. Therefore, Wikipedia is gradually pervading the current Dutch secondary education. Regardless of the finding that this ‘looming elephant’ is currently more accepted in the public and historical sphere, the Netherlands still has a long way to go. The results from the questionnaire, filled in by 100 students ranging from the age of 15 to 18 years old, show that knowledge about Wikipedia and soundness-of-knowledge has not (yet) been reached from this platform.