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."

Comments

Hate

[s1lverl0rd]

Lots of my fellow students copy sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia verbatim, without citing sources. I hate that.

Re:Hate

[ta bu shi da yu]

I'd imagine they hate it worse when the marker uses an automated plagiarism detection program and fails them.

Re:Hate

[commodore64_love]

"These days?" More like "always". I used to do that circa 1985 in 6th grade with an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia. It's nothing new, and yes you get caught when you do it.

Re:Hate

[BrokenHalo]

"plagiarism detection software tends to be regarded as a bad thing by the best educational institutions" [Citation Needed]

That won't get a citation from me, given how many educational institutions use that fucking awful "Blackboard" interface with with that even crappier "Turnitin" plagiarism detection.

There's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a first port of call for a student with no prior knowledge of a particular subject area. But if that's his last port of call, that's another matter altogether, and is easy enough for the most moronic or somnambulant markers to pick up.

As a source of sources, it is invaluable

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The list of sources at the bottom of most entries is a great starting point for research.

Re:As a source of sources, it is invaluable

[OnlyJedi]

Definitely true. I've used Wikipedia many times to get a heads-up on the topic and learn what sources are good for further reading. I would never cite Wikipedia itself; it's a bit too unreliable and, more importantly, changeable to use directly as a source. But with the amount of citations good articles have I can easily track down whatever source the Wikipedian used, read the relevant chapters, and cite that.

Then again, that's how all encyclopedias are supposed to be used. That's why they're usually considered tertiary sources, as opposed to primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia is no different than Britannica or Encarta in that respect. Most of my college classmates have understood this, and the instructors have stressed the importance of a good bibliography.

Re:As a source of sources, it is invaluable

[ircmaxell]

I agree 100%. And as for the "it's not accurate enough for research", I find that it's rarely REALLY wrong. And so long as you go through the sources and don't use it exclusively, it can be a great help. Especially when researching an unfamiliar topic, the Wikipedia page can typically give you a decent 10,000 foot view of the subject, and then you can base your research from there. While I wouldn't use it as a direct reference, you can usually gain enough knowledge from it to at least know what you're looking for when you look at bonafied sources. But then again, it seems like everyone's saying that Wikipedia isn't to be trusted, but that traditional encyclopedias are. From where I'm standing, the only difference between them is the fact that Wikipedia is up front about the "don't trust us". Traditional encyclopedias are typically outdated as soon as they are purchased (for any kind of an active field at least), and typically only show the "opinion" of one or two editors in each subject. Wikipedia at least has the benefit that it's constantly updated and is "peer reviewed" by a significant number of people in the field (at least for the more popular topics). Both have their limitations, but at lest Wikipedia is upfront about theirs...

Well, actually, now that I think about it, you probably could use it in direct situations, depending on what you're researching. If you're doing research into a highly debated subject, Wikipedia usually does a very good job of highlighting the fact from the opinion, and has subsections for each contested part. While this wouldn't be good for a physics research paper, it would likely be very good for a sociology, literary or even a psychology research paper... Subjects that the inherent inaccuracies in a system like Wikipedia would be useful.

Re:As a source of sources, it is invaluable

[FoolishOwl]

Then again, that's how all encyclopedias are supposed to be used. That's why they're usually considered tertiary sources, as opposed to primary and secondary sources.

That's exactly right, and I wish more people would understand that.

Another use I put Wikipedia to: when an assigned text has an unclear explanation of a concept (e.g., the differential of a function, I go to Wikipedia for an alternate formulation. Often the writing is better and clearer on Wikipedia, but even when it isn't, it's at least as good, and a slightly different perspective helps a lot.

credibility

[mugurel]

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.

Euler Angles

[professionalfurryele]

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.

Re:Euler Angles

[radtea]

I'm glad we have a study now which suggests this is how students are using this resource.

So am I, but I'm also waiting for studies that show college students eat, sleep, and worry about money and love just like the rest of us.

The premise of the article is sad: that out default assumption should be that anyone who deviates from white-bread middle-aged middle-American in any respect should be treated as if they were irresponsible, dishonest, or stupid.

I live in a university town, my company has offices on campus, I'm a technical mentor on a program where most of the other mentors are university students, and I'm always surprised when I'm reminded that the students are a couple of decades younger than me, because there just isn't that much difference between us.

Re:Wikipedia is an important research tool

[ShakaUVM]

>>In independent reviews the accuracy was on an equal level as other encyclopedias (Britannica)

Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy. In any vaguely politicized article on wikipedia, you'll see long running edit wars, which only get kinda/sorta resolved when they take a majority rules vote on it, which basically means that the majority of whoever is monitoring a page gets their bias put in.

If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded. This means that wikipedia, in a certain and very real sense, controls the cultural gestalt for, well, most of the civilized world. You'd almost expect more people to be fighting over controlling it.

Re:reverse plagiarism

[getuid()]

Good luck with getting your own essay recognized by the wikipedia admins as a "credible source" for a wikipedia article you're writing...

Re:Wikipedia for engineers?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Isn't that an oxymoron? Wikipedia is the public encyclopedic wiki. If you have just a local wiki installation (random, possibly non-Mediawiki) with your own contents, it hardly qualifies as "having one [Wikipedia] at one's workplace".

Re:Wikipedia is an important research tool

[Waffle Iron]

Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy.

Every information source created by human beings is subject to the exact same problem, so I don't see how that in itself would make Wikipedea worse than other resources.

The reader is always responsible for estimating the bias of any document's author(s) and interpreting the information in that light.

If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded.

This is true for everything in life. In an old-style paper encyclopedia, it just happened that the groupthink was hidden from public view and confined to a small group of the publisher's employees.

What's wrong with limited plagiarism?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's wrong with limited plagiarism?

[stewbacca]

The definition of plagiarism isn't merely "copying sentences"--it's copying sentences and not citing the source when it's not your own, original thought. Many times I've had an original thought and wrote it as my own, only to find hundreds of other people have had the same thoughts, and put them in papers. Just because I wrote the same thought doesn't mean I plagiarized it--only that human minds often come to the same conclusions.

Other times I read tons of background information and then use that mashed up knowledge to form my thoughts for a paper. There's no need to cite any of the sources, unless I copy them verbatim, because I was just using the original sources to become more informed in my thought processes.

How I use Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:reverse plagiarism

[tixxit]

I doubt you'd be using your essay as a source. Rather, you'd realize you wrote a pretty good summary of some subject in your intro with proper sources. You copy/paste this to Wikipedia, along with your sources.