Wikipedia as a Valid Resource

Wikipedia is an absolutely brilliant resource. Every time I need to learn about a topic I wiki it. If I'm unsure of a fact I wiki it. If I need to write an essay I wiki it. We all do it, the first stop on the research train is Wikipedia, and there isn't anything wrong with that. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and an encyclopedia is the right place to go when you want to learn about something. The problem is that an encyclopedia is not the be all and end all of research. If anyone tried to write a University level essay with the only source being the Encyclopedia Britannica they would certainly fail or be told to rewrite it. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has said himself that he has no sympathy for students who get into trouble for citing Wikipedia. He gets about 10 emails a week from students who ask him for help when they get a failing grade due to citing Wikipedia and he just thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.” But I disagree with Mr. Wales, I feel that if your only source is Wikipedia you are indeed an idiot, but I know how I research, and Wikipedia has been a part of my research habits for years. I go to Wikipedia and read up on my topic of choice, I follow related articles around Wikipedia and get vaguely distracted before pulling myself back on track, and I follow Wikipedia's citations to find good starting sources, and browse out from there along the network of papers about my topic. I also search through academic resources for potential papers but I end up on Wikipedia before this simply to familiarize myself with the language needed to actually find a good paper, especially if I need to write on a topic that I am not familiar with.

Citing Your Sources

Every time I write a paper I am lying. I leave Wikipedia out of my bibliography because no one seems to want to let me put it there, but isn't the purpose of a bibliography to provide a summary of the research you have done? Citations exist in order to allow for intellectual honesty, and I am giving the false impression that the structure of my search for information along with the general structure of most of my essays came completely from my own brilliance, and not the essential usefulness of Wikipedia. Telling students not to cite Wikipedia is telling them to lie about how they garnered the knowledge necessary to write their paper. In 2007 the History Department of Middlebury College notified it's students that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams. The article about this goes on to mention the following:

"Although Middlebury’s history department has banned Wikipedia in citations, it has not banned its use. Don Wyatt, the chairman of the department, said a total ban on Wikipedia would have been impractical, not to mention close-minded, because Wikipedia is simply too handy to expect students never to consult it."

But if they know that the students will continue to use Wikipedia, and actually believe that it is simply too handy to expect students to never consult it, isn't a little hypocritical to disallow the proper citation of such a resource? Jimmy Wales commented on this issue as well, saying:

"Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopedia Britannica, either."

But encyclopedias are in the same category as dictionaries in terms of citations. They are able to be cited and there are guidelines on practically every quality style guide on how to go about properly citing a reference book.This is confirmed by the following quote:

The Craft of Research, a classic guide to research, advises that researchers consult reference works such as encyclopedias to gain general knowledge about a topic and discover related works.

So, again, while I agree that citing only Wikipedia is a poor idea, I stand by the fact that as a supporting or background material it is worthwhile and even deserving of a place in your bibliography.

The Flexibility of Wikipedia as a Positive and a Negative

Wikipedia is, by nature, constantly changing. There are simple positives and negatives to this.

The positives are that the information you are receiving is as up to date as it can be, and is constantly being updated and improved, expanded on and reviewed, whereas published papers go through a few rounds of high quality review and inspection before being published, and from then on there are no changes without great difficulty.

Wikipedia is peer reviewed to the extreme, and although everyone who peer reviews a published paper is probably quite qualified to do so, there is an inherent negativity in having a small and static number of people reviewing a document. The more people who look over something and the more varied their backgrounds, the more likely you are to have a well rounded and accurate representation of that something.

The negatives are that with more people come more stupid people, and when just anyone can make changes to an article your likelihood of getting someone who doesn't know what they are doing or purposely wants to make incorrect statements increases. Wikipedia knows this though, and it is possible to watch in real time as stupidity is corrected in pages on Wikipedia, especially on high traffic articles.

Another negative is that it is inherently difficult to cite something that could be different when you actually visit the citation. Wikipedia has a solution to that as well though, with the implementation of the ability to link to a specific version of a page:

It is sometimes useful to link to a specific version of an article (a snapshot of it). For example, one might have done a review of a Wikipedia article and want to indicate which particular version was reviewed.

If the version is not the current version, one can use the page history to view the old version of the page. The URL of this old version is suitable for use to permanently reference this version, and can usually be obtained from the browser's location bar.

My Final Thoughts

While you may end up with false information on Wikipedia for whatever reason, if you spend enough time on your paper and learn about your topic then maybe the incorrect information should be noticeable to you. And if you find a mistake in Wikipedia maybe you should add to the community and correct the mistake instead of writing Wikipedia off as a valid resource. As more well-known scholars use and edit Wikipedia, it becomes a more valid resource. This has already started, and the more scholars support Wikipedia the better it will get. This is my final reason for being all for the use of Wikipedia as a supporting resource. If it becomes okay to use Wikipedia in academic papers, academics will be more active in the community of Wikipedia. These things will feed into each other, creating a better and more accurate online encyclopedia for all of us.

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