Some of my graduate students like to cite Wikipedia as a source in their assignments. As I’ve stated before in this blog on January 24, Wikipedia is a fine resource for finding information quickly. I include links to Wikipedia in my blog posts, especially for technical terms, because these articles tend to be well-edited by Wikipedia’s volunteers.
I don’t recommend that graduate students cite Wikipedia as a reference in their assignments. Wikipedia is a kind of encyclopedia, and encyclopedias are not primary references. They are tertiary references that compile information found in primary and secondary references such as books, articles, web sites and news reports.
Graduate students should use and cite authoritative and reliable references whenever possible. This includes textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, magazine articles and other sources. My IS 6100 students are doing a research paper as their Paper 3 assignment, so I’ve added my page about how to find references to this site at http://billso.com/references/
Wikipedia allows almost anyone to edit any article on their site. Wikipedia doesn’t verify an author’s identity or their credentials, however. Users edit each other’s entries in an endless cycle of revision.
Wikipedia’s reliance on trust and tolerance are facing some review this week after the cite admitted that Ryan Jordan, a 24-year old college student from Kentucky, posed as a “tenured professor of religion” as he edited Wikipedia articles under the userid Essjay.
The New York Times noted that Jordan had also earned the ability to edit vandalized articles and resolve user disputes. Other users found evidence of fraud and plagiarism when they reviewed previous edits that Essjay had submitted for over 20,000 different articles. Wikipedia saves every edit and version of each article on the site.
Jordan had revealed his identity in a July 2006 article in The New Yorker. That article now carries an editor’s note in which the magazine admits they should have checked Jordan’s claims more closely before publishing his remarks last year.
That same new article describes the view of a Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002 when his partner Jimmy Wales was having problems paying the site’s expenses. In Sanger’s opinion, Wikipedia has too many users and editors who are “fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions”. Sanger is developing a rival site, Digital Universe, that will have a more rigorous editing process and lower error rate than Wikipedia.
BBC News and the Times reported that Wikipedia has cancelled this student’s account, but this won’t stop him or other users from creating new identities and editing more Wikipedia articles.
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