Thursday, March 4, 2010

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a valuable tool, but it should not be cited as a source for college level work. Wikipedia is simply a short summary compared to other sources. The wikipedia also faces problems with their quality of work. There are also inaccuracies within the articles of Wikipedia that may be misleading. Although Wikipedia is convenient, it's user generated content makes it questionable to be for paper that require critical thinking.
A Wikipedia may have valuable information, however it is more classified as an overview of the subject. It should merely be use as a starting point and a way to double check your information. College papers require critical thinking, which requires highly detailed information and "...you should not be citing an encyclopedia for college". Teachers should teach their student to use Wikipedia in leading to more Qualified articles.
Wikipedia faces problems with the quality of their articles, which makes them unsuited for citing. Wikipedia has a lot of articles, but they tend to differ with quality. The site lack enough editors to match their ever growing articles, which means that some sentences are either badly worded or confusing.
Wikipedia has inaccuracies, which makes it misleading. Their number of errors may be similar to Encyclopedia Britannica, but it is still significant. The major problem is that student do not double check their facts to see if the information is true. This will lead to poorly developed papers, if you just rely on wikipedia alone. A student should only cite Wikipedia, if he cited primary sources also.

1 comment:

  1. It sounds like you've developed a pretty clear stance. I think the next step is for you to provide lots of evidence and examples to support the claims you are making, then plenty of analysis to demonstrate how your evidence supports your position.

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