Midterm: Reliability of Wikipedia

Midterm: Reliability of Wikipedia

I think every group that presented established the shortcomings of Wikipedia and that using it as a source for academic research is not at all recommended. There are so many reasons which were presented in class that shows how unreliable Wikipedia articles can be. Most articles that were audited had incomplete or missing citations from questionably not credible sources, some form of bias, and some kind of out-dated information. The very nature of how Wikipedia articles are posted/created are its very shortcomings. Anyone can contribute so malicious disinformation can occur, and does. For example, killing Sinbad over and over again. Also, there is no guideline in which the contributors are made to follow. No one checks to make sure that all the entries are up-to-date. There were so many links under citations in the Cloning article that were broken. We were not able to go follow some citations so we were not sure how credible the information being cited was. Another problem with anyone being able to post or contribute is that much of the information becomes opinion-based and less fact-based. In the Cloning article, this occurred when discussing the ethical concerns regarding cloning. Generalizations were made, and "citation needed" kept appearing in that portion of the article.

Overall, I like to use Wikipedia the way a librarian would. Use it as a starting off point. Use it to gain some information and understanding of the topic that you are researching. Use it as an overview. Use some of the sources provided that are scholarly and credible for more specific research. Also use the article as an overview to get some other terms or keywords that would be useful when doing research about the topic. It's a good starting point, not a definitive source of information.