Slashdot Mirror
How Students Use Wikipedia
crazybilly writes "First Monday recently released a study about how college students actually use Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they found, 'Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility.' The study offers some initial data to help settle the often heated controversy over Wikipedia's usefulness as a research tool and how it affects students' research."
Lots of my fellow students copy sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia verbatim, without citing sources. I hate that.
that you must be gathering your information from Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure that's what that Wikipedia article is saying.
The list of sources at the bottom of most entries is a great starting point for research.
My workplace has one, that explains various esoteric concepts like how to get that ancient Windows 3 test program to run on XP, but as far as I know it's only a local resource.
Is there public version of Wikipedia designed for engineers & technicians?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I use it as a means to quickly learn the essence of a chapter whose homework problems are due in only hours, the subject matter of which I haven't yet learned (e.g., due to skipping class). It's a quick and easy way to cut through a lot of a textbook's fluff and get to concrete examples of common problems and have the critical formulas for solving these problems displayed clearly.
As an aside, when I had a class freshman year on electrical engineering, the chair of the department actually suggested we heavily use wikipedia to improve our understanding of the topics at hand.
In the natural sciences Wikipedia is an important tool in research. In independent reviews the accuracy was on an equal level as other encyclopedias (Britannica), see for example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Wpausstellung-18.pdf (german language).
It provides a free source with fulltext search. In many cases the original research is cited, so that you can look for more detailed information.
Just imagine trying to get quick information about something without. I am currently working on Quantum criticality. A quick google search provides you with tons of information, the wikipedia entry is a accurate one-page document which cites the most important theoretical papers from the past few years.
What if I write an essay for my class, and then include parts of it into Wikipedia? Will the automated cheating detectors mark me as a cheater? Sounds unfair.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
In part the credibility of information maybe an external factor, determined by its origin and the media through which it is transmitted. But I think that part of the credibility is due to the information itself. By reading a wikipedia article, you typically get quite a good impression of its credibility, by the stylistic quality of the text, it's structure, presence/absence of references, and most importantly, the quality of the argumentation.
I know that if I go to wikipedia, type "Euler Angles" in the search box and hit enter, then all the information I need to get me started solving whatever problem I'm working on in rigid body dynamics is right there.
If the page was wrong, I'd recognise it. I know what Euler Angles are and can recognise the z-x-z convention. If it has been weeks or months since I last used them however, I go and I look them up. It's faster than a textbook or trip to the library and more likely to pay off than a google search.
Likewise if I need a quick overview of a subject, I fire up wikipedia. It's the equivalent of asking your mate 'Dave' who did a bit of work in the topic a while back about something. Sure you might not be able to trust everything he says because his memory is a little cloudy but he knows this really good text on the subject that is authoritative and he knows you are a lay person so he mentions the bare basics that aren't always in the more advanced texts.
I'm glad we have a study now which suggests this is how students are using this resource. The reason you don't cite wikipedia or use it as a serious reference text is the same reason you don't cite Britannica. It's an encyclopaedia! A really, really, really good encyclopaedia but none-the-less an encyclopaedia. The reason it's popular isn't because it is being misused, it's because unlike most encyclopaedia it actually contains a decent amount of useful information on a broad range of topics. The only reason we haven't had this 'problem' in the past is that until wikipedia encyclopaedia were, due to technical limitations, pretty crappy.
it has some, but not deep, credibility
Then again, what sources do?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
when screenwriters use it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Treasure:_Book_of_Secrets
or bookwriters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Symbol
i can live with some students with shallow term papers. but aren't some books and movies, like the ones linked to above, nothing more than the condensation from a late night session of following wikipedia links? worse than bookwriting/ screenwriting by committee of frat boys
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you're only copying sentences, what's wrong? Many times I find Wikipedia has some of the most concise summaries of complex topics.
When it comes to papers where you analyse data, why not avoid the stupid stuff (definitions) and offload it on wikipedia, and get to the heart of the topic? Wouldn't that be a much more efficient way of writing?
This obviously won't work for persuasive papers, because wikipedia tends to be neutral and fact based.
My issue as of late with Wikipedia is the infiltration of Chinese history into the pages.
Most major inventions are credited to first being invented by the Chinese, regardless how little evidence there is, or whether the invention was anything more than a dream, drawing, or element in a painting.
Moveable type? Invented by the Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moveable_type
The automobile? Invented for a Chinese emperor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile
The Roman Abacus? "May have been inspired by" the Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus
In fact there's a whole list of claims of Chinese "inventions" on Wikipedia that I kind of find dubious, since most of the reference don't exist or suggest otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_inventions
If our students are using Wikipedia as a basis for papers, they are likely just repeating subtle propaganda without knowing it.
Try looking up the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Did you mean the "Tiananmen Square protests of 1989"?
I think it would be better to use Wikipedia as a source to find reference. You find what you're looking for on Wikipedia, then follow the references. If there arent any references then you should probably move on anyways because it's unsubstantiated. IMO this is what makes Wikipedia more useful than many physical sources, its facts are usually referenced and substantiated.
Some of my teachers do that too. I'm in a non-english speaking country, but I'm studying in english, so teachers have to translate their courses.
Once I was having problems understanding something from a pdf from my teacher, so I thought I'd look up the subject on wikipedia. It was the exact same text.
I should have figured it out sooner since a lot of the words in the pdf were underlined (they were links from wikipedia)
wikipedia is super. but it really needs something like
a "depth" slider.
meaning "slider that lets the user adjust the depth of the data",
say, if a user wants to know more about say "turbines" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbines)
s/he could request some more details about geometry, eg. more depth.
-or-
say if a user request information for "curl" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_%28mathematics%29)
can adjust the slider so as to have "less" depth.
the last example/article is next to impossible to understand for a non-mathematician.
-
also wikipedia just needs more multimedia elements, not just pictures/jpegs (and maybe a IRC chan?)
I consider Wikipedia to be just as credible as a face-to-face interview with an expert in a given field. Given how articles are (generally) written by citing field experts, this makes sense.
The basic information will be entirely correct, but the most arcane details should be verified elsewhere. Furthermore, it will now and then include some crazy detail that nobody else agrees with, which should be passed off as fringe theories. It is credible, but not infallible.
I'm sorry if this comes as an insult to experts who think they are infallible.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Timmy Long
Professor Martha Taco
English 201
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[3] well-known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "the Great American Novel",[4] and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He is extensively quoted.[5][6] Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
From 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League,[58] which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members".[25] He wrote many political pamphlets for the organization. The Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.[59]
Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In Following the Equator, Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes".[25] He was highly critical of European imperialism, notably of Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the British Empire, and of Leopold II, King of the Belgians.[25] King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging political satire about his private colony, the Congo Free State. Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.[citation needed]
I hate the faux-intellectual discussions and critiques of Wikipedia. This morning I wanted to figure out which Rolling Stones singles would have been better song choices on American Idol last night so I fired up Wikipedia. There's more information there (and easier to find) than on The Rolling Stones' own web site.
Wikipedia is used for non-academic endeavors as well as being a decent starting point for finding primary sources.
Kids (high school or college) who plagiarize anything from the web by copying and pasting are just stupid and deserve to be kicked from academia...I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to blame Wikipedia for society's ills.
This is how to get away using Wikipedia in college. Use Wikipedia as the main source/clearing house of information, but then cite the source information in the article and not Wikipedia directly. How easy is that?
Yopu for you?
Someone posts a specific example of where conservatives are distorting reality and enforcing this distortion through government laws. And all you can do is give some sort of vague claim that "Teh lib'ruls did it too!" without any specific citations. "If I remember correctly . . ." Yeah, that's good for Beck and Limbaugh, and their dishonest followers. But not for the real world.
I like Wiki because it helps me get started, you know? It tells me what's what so I can obtain some background information or a summary about a topic.
Its got an easy to use interface, I can find out the meaning of new terms, and its easy to understand.
I typically use it at the beginning of my research. Or, as I like to say during my "presearch". It points me in the right direction and helps when I have no idea what to do for a research paper.
I know it's not more credible than other web sites. In fact, I rarely cite Wiki in my papers. Wiki is a great place to start, but a horrible place to end.
To me, Wiki is about four things - currency, coverage, comprehensibility, and convenience. It's up-to-date, tells me what I need to know, it's easy to read, and easy to use.
Like a lot here, I use WP to start off. I've since found that for scientific and technical subjects, it is great, not exhaustive but quite good. Of course some articles are exceptional and some are just useless.
But for historical, sociological, religious, political, etc. subjects, it is very frequently... I would say biased, but in a lot of cases, manipulated would seem a more accurate word. Seems that a wide group of editors or collaborators go for an agenda instead of for a fair attempt at truth, even if it doesn't seem to match with their ideas.
I did Comms Engineering. I found Maths/Electronics/Commns particularly useless on Wikipedia. I and my classmates had to hit the old fashioned books (rather large ones too) to get information.
I find Wikipedia to actually be a useful source of information when doing research. Its essentially a summary of anything useful to you. If you go to Wikipedia and find 'factual information' that is useful to your research then follow it up with the cited source. If the source proves to be reliable then cite that on your own work and not the Wikipedia article you located it on.
Wikipedia is my modern librarian. I go there looking for a summary of resources that I can use for my paper then look them up online or at my university's library/Amazon/etc. Its much easier then attempting to find the useful sources from scratch without any knowledge of the content.
I have never understood plagiarism. I mean, I understand being lazy, but damn. Do these people have such a low grasp of the English language that they cannot re-write, even trivially re-write a passage?
If Wikipedia says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train
"A train is a connected series of vehicles for rail transport that move along a track (permanent way) to transport freight or passengers from one place to another. The track usually consists of two rails, but might also be a monorail or maglev guideway."
What is so hard about writing:
A train is a vehicle made up of a series of connected sub-vehicles designed for providing transport along a track made of rails. These vehicles can be used to move passengers or freight from one place to another. The rails are usually laid in pairs, but sometimes a single rail, or even no rails, in the case of maglev trains, may be used.
I did that in about one minute. It's a complete re-write of the actual citation, without plagiarizing.
But if you really, really want to quote verbatim, why not just QUOTE VERBATIM, use quotation marks, and then cite with a footnote? I mean, damn, most teachers would practically have an orgasm reading something with an actual citation.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I think Wikipedia is quite accurate, more then most people give it credit for. In my University we discussed the authenticity of Wikipedia information and reviewed studies. Most studies found as many errors in Wikipedia (at any given time) equal to, or less than, man scholarly works. In fact as a test some of my friends spent there time deliberately changing Wikipedia contents to false statements. Due to its peer reviewed process not only were their entries promptly corrected, but they even received cease and desist warnings from Wikipedia which were quite threatening.
Only three of my teachers at the University challenged Wikipedia content students found on technical matters (I studied computer technology and science). As an expert in their fields they argued a few topics students had found in Wikipedia pages. On all accounts the teachers were wrong and the Wikipedia articles were correct.
I know most people hypothesis that a peer reviewed knowledge base must somehow be inaccurate or corrupt do to its nature. But to be quite honest, I have yet to find a single quantifiable discrepancy in my own personal research. I thought I had found errors a few times as some items challenged things I had thought correct for years...but I later discovered I was actually incorrect, and the Wikipedia information right.
Does anyone else have any experiences where they were surprised to find Wikipedia information was more accurate then you expected?
If not, then your classmates are idiots.
Let's be realistic, they use copy and paste like everyone else
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
>Plagarism is not copying form a source. It is permissible to copy a definition from a
>source and use it as a direct quotation, as long as it is clear it is a quotation, and
>as long as you cite the source of the text.
I think that's what I said in my closing statement.
>Furthermore paraphrasing a unique idea without crediting the source of the idea is plagiarism,
>even though it is not an exact copy.
Usually, when talking to school kids, "plagiarism" means copying word-for-word from some other source without citation.
Just about anything a school kid is going to be doing a report on will likely constitute "common knowledge". There is little, if any original research done in grade school.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.