This research stems from an observation: either university students or high school and basic school students use with little criticism the information available on the Internet and, in particular, in Wikipedia. That is, they do not assess, usually, the reliability of these sources nor the information itself. They use the information indiscriminately even incurring in situations of plagiarism. These students are designated as net generation (Tapscott, 1998), digital natives (Prensky, 2001), generation of the screen (Kress, 2010) and so on. They have grown up with these technologies but seem to use them in a very superficial way. “Is google making us stupid?”… (Carr, 2010). While investigating this problem, we also want to improve the information literacy of the students through an integration of Wikipedia in the classroom within the formal and compulsory curriculum. This will be achieved through the creation of a pedagogical-didactic activity embodied in a curricular unit which has as the end product an Wikipedia article, collaboratively created by the students.

The online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is a source of knowledge and a space of possibility for knowledge production, since it is edited anonymously and in a self-regulated way. Also, it provides a context for work within the framework of multiliteracies skills. According to Szesnat (2006), research on the educational use of Wikipedia can be divided into two categories: use of Wikipedia as a database of knowledge and use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching. We found a third category in the work of Jandric (2010) whose approach analyses Wikipedia from the point of view of the philosophy that underlies it (anarchism). So this study is based on two integrated dimensions: epistemological and philosophical; and the pragmatic pretext for teaching and learning in a different way. Thus, the study explores the relationship of students with knowledge in the active situation of writing for Wikipedia, trying to raise awareness of the socially constructed nature of knowledge either the official/social or individual one.

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