"That's cool!"

That’s what my ten-year-old son said this afternoon when I showed him Wikipedia.

He’s working on a report for school on Bartholomew Diaz, the explorer who found a way around the southern tip of Africa. He came home asking if I knew anywhere he could find some useful information on the explorer online. His teacher had instructed them not to use blogs, because they aren’t fact-checked.

I told him to go to Wikipedia and look him up. A quick discussion of how Wikipedia works followed, I showed him how we could add a link. We looked at the edit history of the page and saw the changes that had happened in the last year. We looked over the discussion page, noted that some other student doing a report had asked for a map of his voyage, and that someone else had added one to the article afterward.

"This is so cool!"