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I feel like all throughout my school career I have heard everyone tell me "You can't use Wikipedia as a reliable source". Not one of my teachers has ever said it was okay to use it. But why not? I feel like as long as you check the references, it should be okay, especially in the cases of subjects like science. Science is just cold hard facts so it would be sort of hard to fake or lie about that, but other subjects I understand. But, is any other information on the internet more reliable? How are you supposed to know what sources you can and cannot trust? This
article has many insights about Wikipedia, even saying that there is little difference in accuracy between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias such as the Brittanica. Surprisingly, Wikipedia actually has a lot of different people in place that settle disputes between facts and even have "nearly two thousand administrators, who are empowered to "protect, delete and restore pages, move pages over redirects, hide and delete page revisions, and block other editors" according to this
article. Wikipedia is basically just a huge conglomerate of everyone's knowledge, whether that be good knowledge or bad knowledge.
Hey Ashley, great post. I agree that it is hard to find reliable information on the internet, as most sites use a form of crowdsourcing in order to gain more content. YouTube has tons of free information available on almost any conceivable concept, but most of the content is user generated and thus it can be hard to tell if the information contained within is based in truth. I really think it falls more on the reader these days to be able to filter out what is reliable information or not.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the same boat as you, I have always thought wikipedia should be allowed to be used as a source, maybe not the only source, but it should be allowed. Perhaps for wikipedia to be more reliable, there could be a system incorporated into the site that basically says something has been officially fact checked, that way the users know its reliable information. It's just a thought, otherwise great post.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that teachers generally stray away from using Wikipedia due to its reliability. I had one teacher suggest to read the article on Wikipedia then scroll to the bottom to find sources that could be reliable to use, which I thought, was a great suggestion. I agree that it’s hard to be certain on the information that you find on the Internet and it definitely requires filtering through multiple pages to find exactly what you need.
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