Stop the Slander
I’m sure that we’ve all heard this before: “You can’t use Wikipedia as a source”, “You should use school-approved databases”, “Anyone can edit Wikipedia, so it’s not reliable”. I’m here to bring an end to this baseless slander against Wikipedia. It is a perfectly reliable source, and is one of the crowning achievements of human ingenuity.
For starters, everyone who complains about Wikipedia being able to be edited by anyone is missing the point. The reason that it has been so successful is that anyone is allowed to edit it, not just a handful of fancy professors or doctors. If you are an expert in a certain subject, you can write about it for all to see. For example, my dad is an interventional cardiologist, but sometimes, he has to give talks at local hospitals. For one of his talks, he wanted to talk about the history of interventional cardiology, so he did enough research on it to become well-versed, if not an expert, on the subject. After he did his talk, he then wrote the entire Wikipedia article on the subject, and correctly documented his sources. Since then, others who were knowledgeable about the subject added to the article, making it even more useful. And anyone who thinks that you can post anything without repercussion clearly hasn’t met the Wikipedia admins. Those guys are some of the hardest-working, and ridiculously strict, people I have ever had the misfortune of annoying.
Wikipedia also has a variety of articles about several subjects, some of which are rather obscure. A personal favourite of mine is the article on the Dravidian language family from South Asia. I learned more about the languages spoken by my family from this one article than I have from any other source, save my mother. This is the reason I prefer it over other databases, because the other databases I use for school purposes tend to be less informative, particularly if I’m writing about a more obscure topic or controversy.
Look, I’m not saying that we should all cite Wikipedia for research papers; given how frequently articles are written or updated, citing a Wikipedia article for a serious paper is like playing Russian roulette. Just show some love for this marvel of modern technology. You can use it as a preview to learn about certain topics, particularly ones that may not be that well-known. It is completely free to use, so you don’t have to worry about paywalls either. But most of all, Wikipedia gives you a platform to educate the world about something you’re passionate about.
That is so cool to see what your dad did! Although every detail may not be exactly true, it does provide a basic background or the ability to gain a basic understanding of the topic that you are interested in learning about. Sometimes when you look things up, Wikipedia is an easy source to use just to find out a little bit of information. As long as you can back up the information on another source, Wikipedia can be reliable.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Wikipedia is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I do think that at times it can provide solid information, but I also think that because of its reputation it is hard for me to trust what info I find. If I look on wikipedia, I almost always fact check the things I find in the article. Maybe I'll invent a better way for people educated on different topics to share their knowledge, while not having to worry about randoms writing lies and incorrect information.
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting that your dad published an article on Wikipedia. For so many years we've been told that that Wikipedia wasn't to be trusted, so I think we all forget that there still is so much credible information on the site. Though I don't tend to use Wikipedia as a source, I do find that it is a great starting point to introduce me to a topic.
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