Dr Austen-Baker Article On Wikipedia

Majority of students who enroll in history classes partake in analyzing and gaining knowledge from secondary sources. Secondary sources are second hand accounts after an event has occurred. In particular, there are two secondary sources that students utilize and they are lectures and Wikipedia. Despite being secondary sources, there should be careful consideration when analyzing them. Any material that is taught, displayed, or portrayed in lecture are far more reliable than what is presented in Wikipedia. In an academic setting, it is better to always reference and use information from what was taught in lecture than from Wikipedia. It is not a bad resource to use. In fact, Wikipedia is a type of source that provides information for a variety of things that is accessible via the Internet. However, cautionary actions should take place since Wikipedia is a database that can is written or changed practically by anyone. Since this is the case, there can be instances

Discussions between users and editors also take place to ensure the quality and correct information is being published. Wikipedia does realize that work does get by them from time to time and admits that some of the work is complete nonsense. They do not want their work to be used for crucial information but rather to familiarize oneself with a new topic. New ways of governing the website are constantly being explored to improve the overall quality of the work being shared. Ultimately it is the users responsibility to double check information with other sources when needing to find out and use significant information. It has been a very helpful tool throughout the years to find information quickly and is generally a dependable way of finding out new

From websites dedicating their server space to unveiling government conspiracies to those comparing the benefits of different fruits, the Internet is host to many different ideas. The Internet permeates academics as there are websites devoted to making money off of desperate students by writing essays for them. In The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat, Dave Tomar believes that professors feel threatened by our perpetually evolving relationship with information and obstruct students' access to outside material in order to assure their future as controllers of knowledge. However, I believe that professors are purposefully preventing students from accessing knowledge for more benign reasons; unlike Tomar's assessment

If a person wishes to be up to date on what is going on the world around them, in all facets and walks of life, then they must spend a considerable portion of time merely skimming the water of each pool of knowledge, never having the time to truly sink their feet in. This correlates directly back to the massively increased availability of information and writings, whose shoulders Birkerts puts the blame of our loss upon. Nicholas Carr cites a study done on the “behavior of visitors to two popular research sites” which gives its users an even larger degree of online texts.

I also know of other of my classmates doing the same thing, I imagine that this is something done regularly among high schoolers in America. Boyd’s example implies the question “What is the point of banning the use of Wikipedia if kids are going to use it as a source anyways?” After Boyd gives the example of a boy that used Wikipedia as a reliable source and faking the actual source, Boyd talks about why Wikipedia is

The Internet is an uncensored place, where knowledge flows freely, and uninterrupted. The site en.wikipedia.org, is an online wikipedia freely editable by anyone. Therefore, ideas and knowledge can be exchanged freely, if they are accurate, that is another question. Since it is editable by anyone, information can be false, but in most cases, the information found there is highly accurate and updated frequently. You can find knowledge on a range of topics, from WW2, to Philosophy, even to the Bolshevik Uprising. This is an example of what can happen when the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, is both not limited, and uncensored. “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”(Bradbury, 1953) This quote from Montag relates to a world where knowledge isn’t limited. He ponders why a woman, would stay in a burning house, just for her books, just for the potential knowledge in them.

Wikipedia is a collaborative resource, which aims to be a compendium of all human knowledge. In a serious examination of Wikipedia as a credible and valid source of information we need to place our argument within a definable framework. As I will show information has many uses, for the purposes of this paper I will examine the use of Wikipedia for scholarly research, the kind, which I will be utilizing throughout the rest of my MBA program. I will be evaluating Wikipedia based on the parameters set forth by Brenda Spatt. The credentials, Impartiality, style/tone, and currency of Wikipedia will all be examined in this paper (Spatt 2011).

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that draws millions to the site every month. Wikipedia includes millions of articles on a wide range of subjects. Marketing experts state that Wikipedia is a great way to establish a business and gain credibility online. Google certainly agrees with that idea. Type a subject into the search box on the search engine. The odds are that a few of the top sites in the search are Wikipedia based. Clearly, writing business focused articles is a good marketing strategy. Just about all the articles appearing on the site are in the top search engine results. However, it is time to debunk a few of those ripe Wikipedia myths, to get started.

First of all, all mistakes made by one editor can be fixed by another. As Andrea R. Culver, in a comment on “Yes, Wikipedia Can be a Reliable Source,” said, “…If person A knows more about Martin Luther’s early years but not his later ones, and person B knows about the later years but not his early years, they can both edit the article and make it more complete… and if there are serious errors that person A made, persons B,C,D, and E might just change and edit them.” (Comment on “Yes, Wikipedia Can Be a Reliable Source”, 2012) In addition, most print articles are updated no more than once a year, while Wikipedia articles can be updated many times per hour and few go unchanged for more than a year. Wikipedia definitely has a few advantages already mentioned, but this is just the

We have reached the halfway point for our classes. It is amazing how quickly time gets going once homework starts coming due. This week we are discussing unreliability in our research sources. This is an extremely important topic because one bad piece of information in your paper can lead to a loss of credibility. The first topic for our forum this week is why Wikipedia is an unreliable and unaccepted source. Plan and simple, anyone can go on a Wikipedia page and change the information to whatever they want. I have known this for a long time. I was very fortunate to have a college professor who informed our class that the idea of Wikipedia is letting anyone post material about anything they want. This includes changing text

The Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia that lets every individual with Internet connection write and edits its articles. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched their creation in 2001 giving an opportunity to all willing people to work together to develop a common resource of knowledge. Many people have different believes and ideas about Wikipedia, therefore, some tend to think of it as a credible and valid source of information, others strongly disagree. “Since all the books and articles have been chosen for publication, each one has presumably undergone some form of selection and review” (Spatt, 2011, “p.”339-340). Unfortunately, this statement is simply not enough to

When students are doing research on the internet, Wikipedia is usually one of the first site to appear. For students, the site is usually tempting to click, but they are quickly reminded by their teachers that Wikipedia should not be used as a site of knowledge. They label the site as inaccurate, unreliable, and uncreditable. In Boyd’s article she writes that teachers consistently tell students to stay clear of Wikipedia at all cost. Students should not have to see the site as tempting. They should be allowed to use it and embrace the site. Wikipedia has so much educational potential and should not be ignored by teachers. Boyd also writes that some analyses have shown that Wikipedia’s content is just as creditable as, if not more reliable than, more traditional resources.

According to Bill Gates, personal computers are empowering tools that may impact those who use them (Levine, 1997). Although computers can be empowering sources for surfing the internet, not everything that is seen or read on the internet can be considered a credible source. There are many sites that do not provide students with information that can be used within their essay. Reason being, the sites they are being exposed to are written by people who are not professionals within the field they are writing about on their web pages. Students may not know how to do the proper research on the site they are exploring to prove it is credible; as a result, the individuals are recruiting references that are not credible. Therefore, students should be taught how to find credible sources on

Throughout history, human beings have more benefited from the Wikipedia than any other encyclopedias because of the conveniently accessing and easily searching of Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia is free for anyone to look for some quick and basic information, it is widely used by students and academics for introductory concepts. When people try to familiarize or need background information about a topic, they can search on Wikipedia to gain some particularly useful materials even though it is not a reliable source for academic research. Indeed, I gained a basic sense of card counting when I read the Wikipedia entry “Card counting”. However, as I am going to start more in-depth research about how to count card and how to calculate the True counts, it is not rational to adopt Wikipedia because of the imprecise content, the risk of vandalism, and the reliability of Wikipedia.

Eventhough, the internet can be helpful with education, it can also be unreliable. However, “The Hive” by Marchall Poe, was the openness of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can use it. This might work for some people specially that ones who attend school or college. This is very helpful for them because in Wikipedia you can search or find anything you would like. Since anyone can write, or delete or use information off of Wikipedia, it makes it less controversial because anyone can put their input into the website. If don’t agree with something, that’s alright because you can add your own opinion. Poe describes how authors of certain wiki pages write with a bias to support their facts. Facts become opinions when feelings and emotions of bias get involved. “Instead of relying on experts to