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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.
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
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.
Established, peer-reviewed journals?
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 Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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 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.