Is one that many of my friends have heard me rant about before, but because it happened in a presentation last night, well, I felt it was necessary for me to repeat.

Wikipedia.

I’m not some fabulous writer or some amazing researcher, but I can tell you one thing: if you are writing ANYTHING at all, NEVER EVER EVER cite Wikipedia as a reference.

Sure, I know that more often than not when I mention someone or something that I link to Wikipedia here. I think, though, for the basic blogging world, its not too bad to run with and have a comment or two or quickly reference back. Why? Well, if I didn’t know what was what and I read it on a blog? My first instinct is to either Google it or search for it on Wikipedia. So why not just save the work?

Yet, in a research paper? Its completely inappropriate. When you’re researching, the facts have to be accurate, sure, and reputable. People think that Wikipedia is some sort of ultimate online encyclopedia. The issue there, is that its user editable and anyone can write in it or edit it as they’d like. Sure, its moderated, but its not perfectly seamless. I have three examples for you on this one.

1) There’s a classic incident where an individual had written some false information about the Kennedy assassination on a writer’s wikipedia entry. The man’s reputation was drug to the dirt.

2) This past week right after Tim Russert’s passing, a ton of edits were done to his page by people trying to defame him for one reason or another. I witnessed one of them myself when I refreshed the page and it redirected me to this article, with the header “Tim Russert.” I’m sorry, not funny.

3) I was ranting about this same thing and an acquaintance of mine told me that they knew someone who quoted Abraham Lincoln as being “the first black president” because they found it on Wikipedia. Someone had edited the article and put that in and the person happened to find the article after the edit and use it for their paper.

The examples just seem to go on-and-on about issues in reliability and accuracy, but the truth is in Wikipedia’s own words on their reliability. They acknowledge that there is a lot of accuracy in the articles, but that there might be some issues. A good way to look at it is this editorial article from The Guardian from a few years back. While 3 years old, it has the right idea.

The right idea? Use Wikipedia as a springboard. In the two groups that I’m in this semester, that’s exactly what I told my teammates: Cite Wikipedia and we’ll have problems. The honest to goodness best way to use Wikipedia is just to get a general idea of the information and then from there, go to the sources of the article. Its a great way to find what you’re looking for. Think of it like a Google search giving you some prose response, but to cite Wikipedia?

I’m sorry but in my mind, that’s not a good idea. Anyone could go in and switch up a number or two here or there and give you a completely false figure. Change a few “billions” to “millions” and move around decimal points and some scientific articles are worth nothing. Switch up a few names and you change everything.

The whole truth of the matter is simple: its only as good as the information that it cites or the sources it comes from. So maybe, why not just go to the sources?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 11:22 am by Adam and is filed under School, Writings/Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.