I often think Wikipedia gets a bad rap. I heard this once again when my students received library instruction--that Wikipedia is bad because anyone can change it; since anyone can change (expert or not) it is not reliable.
This flies in the face of studies done about Wikipedia that show in fact that it is at least as reliable as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which is (presumably) written by experts.
What this negative attitude toward Wikipedia fails to recognize is Wikipedia's special power toward accuracy. That revision--additions, deletions, rephrasings, citations, etc.--by a plethora of users in aggregate causes a vast majority of the content to be accurate, or at least as accurate as any writing is. Anyone can input inaccurate information, sure, but anyone can also correct that inaccurate information. This has the effecting of levelling the inclines, plucking out the wild hairs, battling out the facts from the fiction democratically. The process causes imperfections in some entries (particularly very timely and controversial information, like negative information about politicians currently running for office) but also provides astounding accuracies that heirarchical references fail to achieve.
Now I'm not suggesting we allow students to use wikipedia as a secondary source in their writing (just as we don't allow them to use encyclopedia), but I think Wikipedia bears reconsideration as a valuable reference source.
About Me
- J. Edwin Paschke-Johannes
- n. ('jA-'ed-w&n-pash-kE-jO-'han-es) 1. A male homosapien of U.S. citizenship, w/ diffused hereditary origins from the Polish, Swiss, German, Lithuanian, Nebraska white trash, and Minnesota backwoods missionary. 2. Name of said male homosapien. 3. One of few individuals, if not the only one existent, to be credited, on public records and various publicly distributed documents, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Education from Midland Lutheran College and a Master of Arts in English, specializing in Creative Writing (Fiction), from Iowa State University, and enrolled in a doctoral program in English, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition, at Ball State University. 4. One of a married couple that have adopted two children, a precocious female and winsome male, from Ethiopia, thus constructing a nuclear family known as “multicultural,” or specifically “transracial,” and grafting onto the couple’s mutual/individual family tree a branch that, to America's racial psyche, is considered radically divergent.
No comments:
Post a Comment