Powerset is a Semantic Web start-up acquired by Microsoft back in July for an undisclosed sum.

The first real demonstration of their technology was an interesting take on searching Wikipedia, which they unveiled in May. Powerset CTO Barney Pell joined the Semantic Web Gang podcast that month, to share the company’s experiences after a week of public visibility.

More recently, the company’s blog reported some results from a survey of student attitudes to Wikipedia itself;

“Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.”

Surprising? Having sat in way too many of those meetings, I’m actually surprised that only 73% have been warned away from the ‘evil that is Wikipedia.’

Honestly, whatever happened to teaching critical thinking? Whatever happened to remembering the drivel that crowds the shelves of our libraries (alongside the gems)?

If students can’t be trusted to learn how to differentiate the good from the bad, whose fault is that? Bad students? Or bad teachers who just want their ‘wisdom’ regurgitated back at them?

Sorry. Rant over. But this endlessly revisited topic really gets me annoyed.

Anyway, digging into the results of Powerset’s study a little more uncovers some other interesting snippets…

80% of students use Wikipedia in performing a background sweep on a new topic. 52% use the references as a way of reaching secondary sources, and (possibly worryingly?) 35% use Wikipedia as a ‘primary research source.’

One question is potentially interesting, and would be worth unpicking in quite a bit more detail than the survey manages;

“When you have used Wikipedia for completing assignments, in general how important/relevant/helpful has it been?”

I was surprised to see that only 28% of respondents found Wikipedia ‘very valuable,’ almost 50% described it as ‘relatively important,’ and 23% found it ‘marginally helpful.’

Powerset presumably want students to move from Wikipedia to Powerset… and it will be interesting to see how that effort is progressing.