Uses of Wikipedia

Are you a researcher? This is for you! Nowadays, many activities are made by Internet. You can buy, study, and pay by Internet almost everything. To obtain information by this way couldn’t be the exception. There are a lot of sites or web pages where it is possible to obtain information. The web page that you visit relies on your own purposes. For example, if you are a scientific investigator, you probably will use serious and reliable sites. One site online related with a lot of information is Wikipedia. “(Wikipedia) is an encyclopedia compiled by the voluntary contributions of hundred of writers and editors. Anyone can write an article and post it to the Wikipedia; anyone else can come along later and edit the article. It’s a kind of open, voluntary, work in progress. As such, it’s the most up to date encyclopedia you’ll find” (Lengel, 2006, para. 6). From my point of view, I think that students should not be allowed to use Wikipedia because its content is not reviewed by experts, is able to be changed by anybody at anytime, and is not suitable to serious purposes such as scientific and technological research.

First of all, the students should not be allowed to use Wikipedia because its content is not reviewed by experts. As a result its content is not true. When you go to find information to your thesis or some scientific essay, you need reliable information which has been reviewed and authorized by a specialist in your area. If you use certain information, you will be able to do a respectable scientific paper or article. In contrast, if you use sources like Wikipedia, which is not reliable because it is written by any people, you will do lower quality academic jobs. “While encyclopedias and journals are generally authored by scholars and peer reviewed before publication. Wikipedia articles can be written and edited by anyone at anytime, bringing about a debate over the risk of giving those outside academia the power to create and contribute to articles on scholarly subjects” (Wolverton, 2007, para. 7). For this reason, Wikipedia is not a good idea to use.

Also, students should not be allowed to use Wikipedia because its content is able to be changed by anybody at anytime. How can you be sure if the information from some specific articles is the same today as it was yesterday, if somebody could have changed it. In the same way, the article can be the same, with the same number of words, but it can appear with some altered word; therefore, the meaning is not the same. As a result, the information is not correct and your time is a waste. In addition, we don’t know if the changes or corrections were made by its own author because anybody can do that. “Furthering this, users can add, alter, or remove information without registering a user account, giving those who visit the site free and anonymous reign over the available information” (Wolverton, 2007, para. 7). It is clear that Wikipedia is not a good source for students.

In addition, students should not be allowed to use Wikipedia because is not suitable to serious purposes. Wikipedia and Internet never could replace to school library (Lengel, 2006). The information that you find in books from the school library is unswerving. Consequently, you can use this information with confidence. For instance, you can use a book of statistic science from school library, and obtain the method that you will utilize at a scientific and technological research. Another example is when you need information from scientific magazine; because you need information specialized from scientific articles. In this case, Wikipedia is not a good idea to do that use with, because the information in it is too general and too simple. Instead of using Wikipedia, you should visit the school library.

To summarize, students should not be allowed to use Wikipedia because its content is not reviewed by peers or people specialized with recognized prestige in the area, the information in it is changeable not only by authors but also anybody; moreover, its content only could be valid for simple purposes not for academic objectives like scientific and applied research.

REFERENCES

Lengel, J. (2006, February 7). Authority. Teaching with technology. Retrieved Jun 05, 2009, from http://tinyurl.com/n5clt2.

Wolverton, J. (2007, January 22). Wikipedia wisdom. Valley vanguard. Retrieved Jun 05, 2009, from http://www.svsu.edu/clubs/vanguard/stories/1141