Last week Wikipedia held a blackout in order to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). All 20 million of the website’s articles were made unavailable for an entire day. This demonstration gained notoriety, and many people took this opportunity to jab at Wikipedia’s enormous stature and importance in the digital information age. “How will college students get any work done?” they jeered. “Now they’ll actually have to read books and go to the library to do real research!”
While students using Wikipedia as their one and only tool is disconcerting, I feel that much of this derision is misguided and woefully misinformed. It seems to me that many are making light of what is a truly revolutionary and important resource. The stigma it receives is unfounded.
One of the struggles facing Wikipedia’s credibility is that it is new, and new things simply aren’t as trusted as their older, more established counterparts. Our culture still views the printed word with a sense of reverence. Meanwhile, the Internet is put under a far harsher scrutiny. The information on it seems far more nebulous and anonymous, without the official grounding of proper authorship.
I remember in high school when I first found out about Wikipedia. It was amazing that so much free knowledge was available, open for anybody to use. However, my teachers raged against using Wikipedia as a source, because “anybody could log in and edit the information!”
It is this exact feature that turned out to be Wikipedia’s greatest strength. The sheer amount of users – many of them being specialists and scholars in the areas of their expertise – who visit the website put a quick stop to any blatant vandalism or wrong information. This staggering amount of peer-review makes Wikipedia statistically more accurate than its published counterparts, including the Encyclopedia Britannica. Once a printed encyclopedia is put out there, it doesn’t change until the next edition.
Wikipedia is in a perpetual stage of revision and improvement.
With this in mind, it becomes harder to rationalize an argument against using Wikipedia. But this does not mean it should be the only resource used for culling information. There are ways of using it responsibly.
Students should always start by asking their professors how they feel about using Wikipedia. While some still refuse to acknowledge Wikipedia as a legitimate source, many others have become more accepting of it in recent years. Still, many professors will encourage you to also look elsewhere to broaden your pool of data. This is generally a good idea anyway, since it’ll keep you from regurgitating information from one source.
Another one of Wikipedia’s strengths is most of its articles are written in clear and concise language that helps ease a reader into topics they might not have an understanding of yet. This makes it a perfect starting point – a stepping stone that leads to further and deeper research. You can then look into finding and reading more scholarly research to enhance your knowledge.
Most articles include a list of sources at the bottom of the page. You should definitely look through these in order to confirm the legitimacy of the information, and to find additional facts that might have been skipped over in the article. Some of the sources might include books and articles you can find at the library.
It’s never a bad thing to seek out as much information as possible. We live in a time where technology is advancing at an exponential rate; we’re able to access knowledge from anywhere at a touch of a button, and it’d be a shame not to utilize it to the fullest.