Ethics and Humanity

Ethics is a system of moral principals and it sometimes seems to be ignored in our everyday lives whether it is in the classroom, work or something as basic as on the Internet.  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is kept up to date by writers, editors and administrators. People are able to create pages and freely edit the pages, which would seem like a good way to keep the pages current but the problem is that people take advantage of the freedom of editing and they sometimes vandalize the site by writing inappropriate things on pages. 

Carra Leah Hood explains a situation she encountered on Wikipedia on her website Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy. She explains that she was looking up something on Wikipedia and she saw that there was an inappropriate racist phrase. She edited it and it only took two weeks for the situation to be all figured out.  In chapter 6, The Lessons of Wikipedia, Zittrain stated,  “Administrators can also prevent particular users from editing Wikipedia. Such blocks are rare and usually temporary. Persistent vandals usually get four warnings before any action is taken.” It appears that it is quite rare that try to vandalize sites over and over once they’ve already been caught but nonetheless, it still occurs.  Not only can people post inappropriate phrases, they can also just post incorrect information, which makes professors skeptical about their students using Wikipedia as a valid source.

When Wikipedia first started it was Nupedia. Nupedia was more of a blog than it was an encyclopedia because people couldn’t entries or comment on entries to question things. What was posted was just there and it couldn’t really be altered to accompany changes (Zittrain, 133).  Without change, whether on the Internet or in the everyday world, things aren’t able to grow or improve our lives. Just as Nupedia grew to Wikipedia, a better encyclopedia, change can also help the growth in our universities.

A lot like the ethical problems in Wikipedia, our universities have some ethical problems that need to be worked out. The number of African American students in American universities is very low compared to the number of white students and the bigger problem, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states in Integrating the American Mind, is “keeping them.” Only a quarter of black students that attended Berkeley graduated or stayed the full four years back in the 80’s. The reason is not only a financial reason but also what our classes are teaching them.

Humanities is a topic that most universities teach; not only do they teach it but usually the students need to take a certain amount of hours in humanities courses to graduate college. It’s a way to teach students about the world they are living in. African American students don’t necessarily feel as if they are able to learn about their culture because American universities offer more classes about the history of America or Europe than they do about the Middle East, Asia or Africa. The humanities course in America have “meant the best that has been thought by white makes in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian traditions…” instead of “the best that has been thought by all human beings” (Gates, pg. 346). Students need to be given the complete history of the world so they feel more comfortable in universities and so they feel like they belong just as much as a white student belongs in the university.

Teaching a class in a university is a lot like editing a webpage on Wikipedia. Its sharing information that a person thinks is important enough to share with a large group of people. It needs not only be correct information but it also must be relevant information that will make sense to the audience. It should be ethical and cater to the needs of the audience.