Ever since high school, I have been told not to rely on Wikipedia because it is not a trusty source. You are not sure who posts this information and they may not be an expert on the subject. While this is true, I find myself using Wikipedia frequently throughout my day. It is so easy and so quick. You can literally Wikipedia anything! No matter what it is, there will be some sort of information on the topic chosen and this is why I love Wikipedia! I do not trust it for research projects but it is a great place to begin learning about a topic. Conveniently, I was recently assigned my term paper for my Psychology class which is all about Wikipedia. The assignment requires us to find a topic and after reading up on it using this site, to go further using scholarly articles to “fix” it and make corrections. It seems that my professor does not trust in the site and wants us to “correct” it. We will then be able to publish what we complete, educating others properly in the process.
Throughout high school teachers always told us never to use Wikipedia because it is plagued by incorrect information. My youngest sister is 10 years old and when she needs to look things up online, her teachers tell her not to use Google, but to use Wikipedia because its always accurate. The first time she told me this I almost fell out of my chair because I was so shocked. What a huge difference 10 years makes...
ReplyDeleteI had a similar project last semester in which I had to revise a wikipedia page for a specific historical topic. We had to format our paper to look like a real wikipedia page and everything. It looks like professors are starting to warm up to the idea of wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a really cool project because you actually get to see how factually incorrect the posts are. It would be really interesting to average out how many corrections you and your classmates had to make on the number of articles you all wrote about to see the typical number of mistakes in articles.
ReplyDeleteYes, this is a great assignment, because it tests the accuracy of Wikipedia, rather than assuming it is good or bad, it gets students to make a contribution to this important resource as well, and it teaches you about how it works.
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