Wikipedia as a primary source?

[PlixTixiplik]

That may be true, but the broad knowledge they may have doesn't really help stamp out inaccuracies. The guy who wrote a news piece on one of my recent papers for MSNBC and Fox News also writes some of the short news briefs for Scientific American - yet he still got a few of the details wrong and jumped to some incorrect conclusions in his first draft, and that was even after I discussed things on the phone with him. The end result ended up being pretty good, although MSNBC added their own hilariously wrong headline. It was so off-the-wall that I saved a copy of the webpage before they fixed it.

But that's just part of the territory, as no one can be enough of an expert in every field to be able to summarize the broad range of studies they have to. One week it's a genetics paper, the next it's cosmology, and so on...

-MEC

 

[Balthier the Great]

I see no problem with using wikis for nontechnical subjects when doing an internet debate. I won't accept wiki as a source for something extemely technical (say how some device works, or something in advanced physics), I'm not going to accept wikipedia because you'd really have to be an expert to understand the subject, and wikipedia doesn't care about that.

I'm also leery of Wiki for school/work just because encyclopedias simply aren't accurate enough to give you the whole picture. That goes for print encyclopedias as well, I'm not picking on Wiki here. But if I was ever teaching a course on any subject, and a kid uses wikipedia as a source, I'd fail him (or at least not credit him for research). Encyclopedias are fine as a WTF are you talking about source, not a research source.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Oddly, Wikipedia is actually at it's MOST accurate when dealing with complicated or specialized mathematical or scientific concepts.

 

[Lumen]

That's to be expected, IMO. Those informed enough to comment are so few and far between that the ability of the uninformed masses to dilute such entries is extremely limited, since they couldn't begin to say anything even remotely pertaining to the topic, and they probably wouldn't have even heard of the topic in the first place.

For a lot of those topics, there are very few people who have heard about it and also don't know anything about it. Those who know it exists also know something about it, because that's really the only way to learn of it's existence. The more specialized you get, the less common knowledge about its existence becomes. Eventually, you get to the point where having heard of something practically ensures that you're qualified to talk about it.

I don't know how accurate this article on Le Cam's theorem is, but it's probably more accurate and useful than this excessive, wasteful and poorly sourced article on fountains.

 

[Ariadne]

^^ Especially since it has paper books as it's source.

It also happens to match what Mathworld has to say on the subject, which is what I use when I need to know things like that.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

University students get a lot of flak for using wikipedia, they should do when they have university libraries to access and browse.

As noted, wikipedia draws on other sources itself so isn't really a primary source of information. But a well written article will have reference and footnotes, so will give an idea of where to start looking.

 

[Csalem]

A person in my class who is a tutor to under-graduates said she once received an essay from someone in their first year of a BA course and every reference was from wikipedia. Personally I found that slightly worrying as it shows a level of laziness. I love going to the library and finding some obscure facts when researching for a paper or even just to get a difference of opinion.

 

[Goliath]

I once had a student whose senior seminar paper was largely based on a few wikipedia articles. I failed him--hard. What's more, I raked him over the coals in class, in front of his peers, as an example to the rest. I recently learned that this incident became a black legend among that group of students.

I don't allow students to cite encyclopedias, period--whether it's wikipedia, or encarta, or the Britannica. No exceptions.

It's reasonable to start with an encyclopedia--that's what encyclopedias are for. But there's just no excuse for stopping there--not when there's a whole brick-and-mortar library to consult, along with an ever-growing number of online resources.

Any student who bases their work on wikipedia alone might as well write 'PLEASE GIVE ME AN F' on their title page, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Unicron]

Arrghman said:
I agree with absolutely everything PlixTixiplik said.

As do I.

 

[Ronald Held]

I do as well.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Count me in on the PlixTixiplik love as well.

 

[Ariadne]

Camelopard said:
I don't allow students to cite encyclopedias, period--whether it's wikipedia, or encarta, or the Britannica. No exceptions.

It's reasonable to start with an encyclopedia--that's what encyclopedias are for. But there's just no excuse for stopping there--not when there's a whole brick-and-mortar library to consult, along with an ever-growing number of online resources.

Don't you have to cite anything you read?

 

[Arrqh]

Toresica said:

Camelopard said:
I don't allow students to cite encyclopedias, period--whether it's wikipedia, or encarta, or the Britannica. No exceptions.

It's reasonable to start with an encyclopedia--that's what encyclopedias are for. But there's just no excuse for stopping there--not when there's a whole brick-and-mortar library to consult, along with an ever-growing number of online resources.

Don't you have to cite anything you read?

 

[David cgc]

Toresica said:
Don't you have to cite anything you read?

No, you have to cite anything you use. I could read on Wikipedia that the population of elephants has tripled, but when I mention that in my zoological paper, I should cite an original, reputable source for that fact, and not a tertiary source like Wikipedia.

 

[Csalem]

Some people cite everything they read but I think good form dictates everything you use. I know in my thesis I removed some entries from the bibliography that I composed based on notes I took as they did not make it into the final work.