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

Procrastination tool

[Rijnzael]

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.

Re:Hate

[s1lverl0rd]

No, but it illustrates how Students I know Use Wikipedia.

reverse plagiarism

[fph il quozientatore]

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.

Credibility

[Bromskloss]

it has some, but not deep, credibility

Then again, what sources do?

Re:Wikipedia tells me...

[dkleinsc]

Well, as recent events in Texas have demonstrated, a minority conservatives think it's better to change reality to suit their ideology than to change their ideology to suit reality. Which was exactly the same motivation for Conservapedia.

Re:Credibility

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I publish in Peer reviewed journals and i have a very low rejection rate.

IMO Peer review is overrated. Plenty of crap gets though, and plenty of good work gets walled out.

The China Problem

[BlueBoxSW.com]

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"?

Re:The China Problem

[digitalhermit]

Exactly.. It's not specific to Chinese though, as just about every culture makes claim to great inventions. In the US, many believe Henry Ford invented the automobile. Many believe Edison invented the light bulb. Entire cultures believe that reading Hamlet in the original Klingon is the only way to appreciate the nuances of revenge. The thing is that you can qualify the inventions as much as you want. There are incremental changes, early failed prototypes; we stand on the shoulders of giants, after all. Maybe Ford was the first to mass produce automobiles or Edison was the first to make a bulb that lasted, but to claim that they were the original inventors is wrong.

Movable type though? Probably Chinese. Fermented beverages? Probably not. Well, at least they probably weren't the only "inventors". Use of salt? Hmmm. Probably some over-zealous folks elsewhere tweaking articles to match the history they learned in school. Or a government tweaking folks to match their world view. Either way, history is mutable.

Re:The China Problem

[furbyhater]

Movable type: Definitely first invented by the Chinese, see sources.

Automobile: A (western) jesuit designed a steam-powered vessel for the emperor, nobody knows if it has ever been built (clearly stated in the article).

Abacus: What should I say? Seems like the Chinses were first.

Do you have a problem admitting that the Chinese made some inventions before the west?
Let's just give credit where credit is due.
Just because your history class told you otherwise because it ignored inventions made by other civilisations than the "west" doesn't mean that the wiki articles aren't true.
You call it "infiltration of Chinsese history", I call it "accurate and complete information".

entry.point.depth

[Anonymous Coward]

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?)

Wikipedia as an expert

[Sarten-X]

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.