Trivia for the Day: Why is Wikipedia not a good source in academic writing?
By Cruz
@Tierkreisze (1609)
Philippines
June 9, 2017 10:36pm CST
A common bane to students everywhere is the teacher who says that you can't use Wikipedia for your essay/research/literature review. Here's why:
The main reason is that Wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone, and that includes pranksters. For instance, they may change the dates, names, or even add facts themselves. Although there're discussion forums for editing changes, some pages might be left unchecked for weeks that any wrong facts may be left unedited.
Now, this doesn't mean that Wikipedia is bad. It's just a good place to be introduced to certain topics so you could get a good grasp on it, but not a good place to cite your paper on. Also, this applies to all kinds of blogs and most websites.
5 people like this
5 responses
@egdcltd (12059)
•
10 Jun 17
Wikipedia can be a starting point but you need to then follow citations back to their original sources and see if those sources have decent academic standing. If they don't, see if they cite sources and follow those back as well, continuing until you find something reliable and checked.
1 person likes this
@egdcltd (12059)
•
13 Jun 17
@Tierkreisze Even news articles can be wrong as well. Especially, I've noticed, from right-leaning U.S. publications, even fairly decent ones. It appears they don't always fact-check, or simply assume that no-one is going to check up on them (less true in the days of the global internet).
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@Tierkreisze (1609)
• Philippines
13 Jun 17
That's right. There are some references in Wikipedia that point to news articles and web pages (although most lines I've read that cite those things state that they were from news articles or web pages). So it would be better to read very carefully by following the citations like you said, or just take the gist then move on to other works.
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@Tierkreisze (1609)
• Philippines
10 Jun 17
@Lupita234 Not always. There's just some mistakes but not all of them are.
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@TiarasOceanView (70022)
• United States
10 Jun 17
Yes so many contribute and who is to say they are correct.
1 person likes this
@ridingbet (66854)
• Philippines
10 Jun 17
we discourage our students to research using Wikipedia as the main source of information. i think the authors of some subjects there are not certain about what they post. i would still prefer our students to use their books
1 person likes this
@Tierkreisze (1609)
• Philippines
10 Jun 17
Like I wrote, Wikipedia is good only for introducing topics. It's not that Wikipedia page authors don't know anything. The topics there have citations and when there are none, there's a sub header that says it lacks citation.
Now, I also think you're right in that students should still use their books more than Wikipedia. Though then again, not all textbooks are reliable. It still pays to read from different sources than just focus on textbooks or Wikipedia alone.
@reskyyandi (3608)
• Indonesia
12 Jun 17
Wikipedia is not entirely correct because there is some information that has been edited by some users
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