Students and Wikipedia: some (limited) facts
Okay, I’ve probably raised Jim West’s blood pressure by including the words Wikipedia and facts in my post title. I continue to stand by my view that Wikipedia has its place for the student who knows how to use information sources critically. And now a new piece of research suggest that some students, at least, don’t treat it as the be-all and end-all of looking for information, but are, in fact, both more traditional and more sceptical.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:18 am
as a former student who spent a significant amount of time at university writing, and now am beginning more writing (at seminary), i dont ever use wikipedia as authoritative. i love the ease of access, i love the ability to jump from one topic to another through the internal links, and i understand that the links at the bottom (the sources) are the most important part.
with that said, i would never use it for a paper. i use it all the time to get a general synopsis of a concept of idea or get some starting point for research in the future, but i never use it as a source.
just my two cents.
peter
August 30th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
It really does depend. A few months ago I submitted a piece of work as part of my education postgrad. One of the references was to a Wikipedia article. The reason for including it was that I needed to explain a concept from outside of the normal education knowledge domain and I found the Wikipedia article to be a useful summary of the concept from an area of study in which I was already reasonably expert but couldn’t expect my readers to be.
The worst thing is the knee-jerk ‘anti’ reaction without considering further. I see it sometimes in HE colleagues who can be sniffy about ‘too many’ web references; the issue is really about quality and critical appraisal. The irony is that the knee-jerk reaction shows a failure to apply the latter and so misses the former on principle.