Why wikipedia

You should, therefore, read critically all sources, not just Wikipedia articles. To ensure a better chance of accuracy, though, college-level research-based writing assignments generally ask you to use sources written by academic professionals and recognized experts.

The second aspect of Wikipedia that many teachers do not like is its changeability: Wikipedia articles do not remain the same over time. The Michael Jackson article makes this explicit. As a result of such changeability, Wikipedia articles are unreliable; the article you cite today may not exist in that form tomorrow. This variability challenges prevailing understanding of how published texts work so causes some anxiety. Because print texts are relatively stable, we expect texts we read and cite to be the same when we go back to them later.

Even Wikipedia contributors express worry about the implications of article changeability for citation:. Among other problems. That just linking to the article sans version information is not enough can be seen by those Wikipedia articles themselves which refer to others, where it is clear from following the link that a different version was referred to and there is no clue which of the many versions in the history was actually read by the person who cited it.

As Wikipedians explain, article variability makes citing hard because it is difficult for readers to know which version of a Wikipedia article an author cited.

And academic audiences like to be able to return to the texts you cite to verify the conclusions you draw from them. Teachers have concerns about you using Wikipedia as a source for another reason—one that has less to do with Wikipedia itself and more to do with the kinds of texts you are expected to use in research-based writing.

Most college-level writing asks you to engage more deeply with a subject than does an encyclopedia, and doing so entails reading more than the general overview of a topic that encyclopedia articles provide. Because of their open participation, unreliability, and potentially shallow topic coverage, you generally should not cite Wikipedia articles as authoritative sources in college-level writing.

This does not mean that Wikipedia is not useful, or that you cannot read it, or that you should not cite it if you do use it. It does mean that Wikipedia is better used in other ways. There are productive ways to use Wikipedia.

In fact, Wikipedia can be a good source in three different ways. Rather than a source to cite, it can be a source of 1 ideas, 2 links to other texts, and 3 search terms. To use Wikipedia as a source of ideas, read the Wikipedia article on your topic when you begin a research-based writing project to get a sense of the multiple aspects or angles you might write about.

Many Wikipedia articles include a table of contents and headings that provide multiple lenses through which you might frame an argument e.

Looking at the table of contents and headings can help you view your topic from vantage points you might not otherwise consider and can give you directions to pursue and develop in your writing. You can also use Wikipedia as a gateway to other texts to consult for your research.

These lists pro vide the names of—and often direct links to—other sources. Take advantage of these leads. When you have decided on a topic and are searching for sources to develop and support your thinking, look at these references, external links, and further reading lists. You still need to evaluate a source to determine if it is suitable for use.

Figure 1. For this project, I began on Wikipedia, knowing that results were not accurate, but also knowing I could find useful search terms there. I was only slightly familiar with the psychology angle I was using for my paper, and so Wikipedia gave me a rough sketch of the general background. From here, I used the information I gained from Wikipedia to search for books form [ sic ] the.

You might find Wikipedia similarly useful. Not only is Wikipedia potentially useful for generating ideas, finding sources, and determining search terms, but it is also potentially useful for remembering and understanding some of the tasks that are frequently part of good research-based writing: reviewing, conversing, revising, and sharing.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all types of research-based writing ask you to do these tasks in exactly the same way or that your writing should emulate a Wikipedia article. However, some of what happens in making successful contributions to Wikipedia parallels some of what happens in producing effective research-based writing. Looking at Wikipedia can help to demystify these practices. These practices happen recursively—that is, they repeat—so the order in which I present them here is not necessarily the best or correct one.

While you do not need to move through these practices in a specific order, you will want to engage in these activities for many research-based writing assignments. Before proceeding, let me offer an overview of the Wikipedia interface so that the following discussion, which points to specific aspects of the interface, makes sense.

This content is what displays automatically when you open an article in Wikipedia. On this page users can, among other things, suggest changes to an article, justify changes they made to an article, and ask why other users made changes to an article. You can participate in this conversation.

You can make these changes. Figure 3. Each of the sections below is devoted to a practice common to both successful Wikipedia contributions and research-based writing. In each, I explain how Wikipedia authors engage in that practice, outline how you can learn from what Wikipedians do to engage in that practice for your research-based writing, and finally provide a specific way you can use Wikipedia for help with that practice. Examining the role of reviewing in contributing to a Wikipedia article can help you understand the role of reviewing in research-based writing.

To make a successful contribution to Wikipedia, authors must review what other contributors have already written about the topic. To do this review, successful Wikipedia contributors read texts in and outside of Wikipedia. They look at previous versions of an article on the history page, including the change summaries provided by authors, and read the discussion surrounding an article on the discussion page.

To show that they have reviewed other texts published on the topic of the article they are contributing to, Wikipedians also provide citations for material they post. As shown in figure 4, an absence of citations often results in a warning that someone needs to cite a source to support what is written or the text will be removed.

Figure 4. This process parallels what you can do for research-based writing assignments. Review what other contributors have already published about your topic so you avoid writing something that is inappropriate, off topic, or repetitive. Doing this review in formal course writing is somewhat different than doing it in Wikipedia, though. You need to acknowledge in the texts you write that you have reviewed what others have previously published by doing what is called a literature review.

There are approaches to cognitive, and consequently behavioral, functioning that stem from ideas that each side of the brain thinks differently. Michael Grady asserts that a person who thinks with one side of his brain will differ greatly than a person who thinks with the opposite side 20— The Prefect exemplifies the left side thinking with his systematic and complex approach to finding the purloined letter, while the Minister and Dupin utilize both right and left side attributes, thinking about the cognitions of the other and acting accordingly.

Wikipedia generally uses hyperlinked endnotes, while the most popular academic citation styles from the American Psychological Association APA and Modern Language Association MLA , which Gill uses here, require in-text parenthetical citations and reference and works cited lists, respectively.

Despite these differences, the larger idea is the same: in your research-based writing you need to show you have reviewed other relevant texts to demonstrate conversance with appropriate source material and to allow readers to verify your conclusions. I end this section suggesting a way you can use Wikipedia to help you with this reviewing process. My intention here is to not to prepare you to contribute to a Wikipedia article itself, but rather to use Wikipedia to prepare you to do the reviewing that is part of successful research-based writing.

When you are beginning a research-based writing assignment, read the discussion page for the Wikipedia article on the topic you are writing about and identify the debates, questions, and absences that you find. In other words, list what contributors 1 argue about i.

Then identify these debates, questions, and absences for the published literature i. Review what other authors have written about them. Looking at the discussion page first allows you to enact on a smaller scale what you need to do with a wider range of sources for a literature review in a research-based writing project. Were you to write about the history of the board game Monopoly, you now have several avenues no pun intended! Figure 5. A second practice successful Wikipedia contributors engage in that reflects a successful practice of research-based writing is conversing.

Productive Wikipedia authors situate their contributions to an article in relation to those of past authors, recognizing that making a contribution to an article is like stepping into an ongoing conversation.

As with reviewing, conversing is another practice frequently characteristic of successful research-based writing. You should respond to the sources you use rather than just report on or parrot them.

While Wikipedia contributors can literally insert themselves into a conversation on a Wikipedia article discussion page, you can engage in conversation with sources in research-based writing by quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing them; by indicating agreements, disagreements, and connections among them and you; and by showing their insights, limitations, and applications. Consider the following example.

Wilson and Linda H. Casey bolded below , have written about youth reading behaviors and inserts what she wishes to say in response to them unformatted text below :. Although many people could have already guessed, this NEA report officially states what has been on the decline since the early s.

However, it seems as though the NEA left out some important data when conducting their study. Children and young adults have been reading comics and comic books since their beginning. Some educators also use comics in class as a way to interest students who would be otherwise unwilling to read Wilson and Casey However, literary studies rarely include comic books in their questions and surveys of youth.

If a young adult spends 3 hours a week reading comic books, the study will not include that in their overall findings. It is as if that time the young adult spends reading means nothing. This statistic leads me to believe that teens are actually reading more than what the recent studies suggest. They may feel discouraged and give up reading all together after finding out the things they like to read are not valid in the literary and educational worlds.

In this paragraph, Chesmar makes clear that she knows important components of the ongoing conversation about literacy and reading: the National Endowment for the Arts NEA released a study that reports reading amount and proficiency has declined in the United States and, though popular among young adults, comic books did not count as reading material for the study.

She puts sources discussing these ideas into conversation; note the back and forth between the bold, italics, and unformatted text. Chesmar thereby establishes her role in the conversation: she thinks the NEA report provides misleading results because it ignores certain types of reading material, which, for her, can have some troubling consequences.

Again, I end this section offering a suggestion for how you can use Wikipedia to help you with the research-based writing process—in this case, by putting your sources into conversation with one another and with you. One way to engage in a conversation like Chesmar does is to construct a dialogue between your sources like the dialogue on a Wikipedia article discussion page.

Identify topics your sources address and create headings for them e. Then quote and paraphrase relevant material from your sources and group it under the appropriate heading. Finally, situate these quotes and paraphrases in relation to one another and add yourself to the discussion. Literally construct a dialogue between them and you. The idea is to see yourself as a participant with a voice in the conversation.

Another practice that is part of successful Wikipedia and research- based writing is revising. Effective Wikipedia contributors revise articles frequently. They take advantage of the wiki capability to edit the articles they read. To be successful, they do not give up when other people delete or change their contributions but instead revise in response to the feedback they receive be that from posts to the discussion page, change summaries on the history page, or administrator explanations for why something was removed.

The history page for nearly any Wikipedia article provides evidence of how frequently Wikipedians revise. Figure 6, for instance, shows that authors made eleven revisions to the Michael Jackson article in one hour on 28 June As this page illustrates, making an enduring contribution to a Wikipedia article is an ongoing process of negotiation with the reading audience. Moreover, those contributors who revise the most and have their article contributions last for a long time can gain in status among the Wikipedia community and be promoted to administrators.

It is, in other words, through revising that Wikipedia contributors earn respect. Figure 6. To succeed at research-based writing, you, like a successful Wikipedian, should also revise your texts multiple times in response to feedback you receive. You might receive such feedback from teachers, peers, writing center consultants, roommates, and friends who offer advice and suggestions rather than from strangers who change the text itself, as is the case for Wikipedia contributors.

But the larger idea remains: creating an effective text involves multiple iterations of recursive revision. You need to write a draft, get some feedback, respond to that feedback in your next draft, and repeat the process.

Good writing entails thinking through your ideas on the page or screen. None of which is to say that Wikipedia is, by any means, perfect. In fact, just as the design of its institution and platform means that it is a more informative and accurate site than YouTube, it can also encourage bad and unfortunate behavior. As an online space dedicated to facts above all else, and where editorial decisions are made through conversation and voting, it can be a place where only the loudest and most persistent and self-confident users feel comfortable.

Wikipedia, like every organization, struggles with bias: Its editors are often male and white. The phenomenon of ideological extremists holding sway over individual and highly contentious articles has largely ended, in part because Wikipedia is designed to make such domination very difficult.

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