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Wikipedia Has Become a Science Reference Source Even Though Scientists Don't Cite it (sciencenews.org)
Bethany Brookshire, writing for Science News: Wikipedia is a gold mine for science fans, science bloggers and scientists alike. But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it. The site rarely ends up in a paper's citations as the source of, say, the history of the gut-brain axis or the chemical formula for polyvinyl chloride. But scientists are browsing Wikipedia just like everyone else. A recent analysis found that Wikipedia stays up-to-date on the latest research -- and vocabulary from those Wikipedia articles finds its way into scientific papers. The results don't just reveal the Wiki-habits of the ivory tower. They also show that the free, widely available information source is playing a role in research progress, especially in poorer countries.
They might cite your footnotes, though.
Wikipedia is also more accurate than many people give it credit. I know there was a study done several years ago comparing Wikipedia's articles against Encyclopedia Britannica. They had experts in certain fields look at articles picked at random. There were fewer errors per page (and more overall information) in Wikipedia than there was in EB.
Sure, people deface pages all the time; but overall, despite getting a bad reputation as being inaccurate, it's more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Why shouldn't they? Some of the Wikipedia articles are written by scientists.
When I was in high school, wikipedia was just starting to take prominence and kids were starting to use it for research. This caused a bit of grift because it was much easier to look things up in wikipedia at home than it was to go to libraries and such. So some teachers banned the use of it. But I had a smart teacher that said "wikipedia is a great starting point for research but it is not reference material. Find the actual source of the information you use". Sounds like the actual scientific community is using it in exactly the same way!
What I've seen quite often is that people use Wikipedia twice: first to get a cursory overview about the topic, and then to browse the reference list for further reading. So yes, they often don't cite Wikipedia itself, but they make heavily use of the references.
Instead of "vocabulary from those Wikipedia articles finds its way into scientific papers," it was the vocabulary for the scientific paper that ended up in Wikipedia.
But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it.
Oh they'll admit it. They just don't cite it. There is nothing wrong with that. My wife could fairly be described as a scientist and she has several peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters to her name. She uses Wikipedia (and will freely admit as much) as a way to get her bearings on a topic she isn't deeply familiar with. Then if needed she jumps off to primary data or more authoritative sources when she needs to go deeper. She's under no illusion about the fact that Wikipedia isn't always reliable but it's certainly useful in many circumstances.
Encyclopedias have value even to subject matter experts because nobody is an expert in everything. If you need a quick primer on a topic Wikipedia can be a great place to start. No it won't and shouldn't be cited as a reference but it's a useful tool to avoid repeating the task of getting an overview on a topic.
To the extent that they play a role, it is expected to drill down to the citations provided by the article, and chase down the citations provided by those sources, and so on until you get to the original works and internalize them for yourself.
The idea is to avoid a telephone game where material gets cited and slightly 'refined' repeatedly and get distorted.
However it is expected to use those resources to help identify relevant source material.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I give them money every time they ask. And I'm not at all bothered if there's some skim going on at the foundation. They destroyed a friends' 20th century business model, being a recognized expert on a few historical niches, but c'est la vie.
Wikipedia (just like Encyclopedia Britannica back in the dead tree days) is a secondary source (i.e. it contains no original research and every fact in it should come from some other, cited, primary source). Secondary sources are not typically cited in a research paper, not because of concerns about accuracy, but because primary sources are always preferred.
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When I was in college doing my M.Sc we were told that Wikipedia was not to be referenced, and we could be marked down or failed for referencing it. The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct. (WolframAlpha, incidentally, can be referenced).
I did find myself using Wikipedia for the references, though. There are a lot of citations on every page, so if I wanted to look up something for a paper, I'd look up the citation on the wikipedia page and use it.
It is amazing how much Wikipedia has improved over the years. It has become a valuable starting point. There are various layers of information and it would be interesting to know the scales. If the Wikipedia's content is scaled to 1, the content of books I would estimate to be 1000, the content of articles and knowledge not processed to books yet, 50000 and then knowledge available in non-published material, lecture notes, expert knowledge, maybe 100000. It would be interesting to see, how others see that. My own experience is that even if having literally scanned through all books of a topic (in the dusty stacks of the library), it is still only a small part. Next comes checking the secondary literature, literature cited in books, the ternary literature, literature cited in such citations. Even after checking search engines, databases, citation indices, preprint archives still, it is possible to miss something. There is hidden knowledge, maybe never cited, never looked at, maybe never written down and only known by experts. In all this huge amount of knowledge, it is good to have an entry point.
The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct.
Even if it couldn't be changed there still would be no guarantee that the information is correct. Correctness isn't the issue for citations and citations make no assurance that the data being cited is correct. Things get cited all the time that either aren't or are later determined to be incorrect. The problem is that because it can be changed there is no way to ensure traceability of the specific version of reference. If it is printed in a magazine you can see exactly the text cited. With a web page that can be changed any time with no version tracking it is impossible to know what data was cited.
If Wikipedia had some reliable way to reference a specific version an article being cited then it would be reasonable to cite Wikipedia. You just have to be able to unambiguously identify the specific text being cited. It's not a primary reference but there is nothing inherently wrong with citing non-primary sources as long as you can look up exactly the data being cited later on.
Rather obvious: Scientists do not want to cite a source whose content can change the next day. No big surprise.
You don't cite second-hand hearsay, highly editorialized summaries or quotations of quotations, you go to the actual research article.
Not that simple. It's ok to cite secondary sources (including opinion pieces or editorials) as long as it is made clear that that is what it is and provided that the secondary source cannot change in the future. Primary sources are preferred for obvious reasons but there are sometimes good/useful reasons to cite secondary sources. The biggest problem with citing something like Wikipedia is that there is no straightforward way to cite the specific revision of an article. Citations simply need to be able to unambiguously and reliably point to the exact data/text being cited. You can cite a paper article because there is no chance of it being changed in the future and there is a reasonable chance of it being accessible in the future. This is true even for opinion pieces. Primary sources are to be strongly preferred but it's foolish to categorically refuse to use secondary sources as long as they can be reliably referenced.
Way back in 7th grade when we started to learn how to do research papers. The early lesson is this.
Use Encyclopedias as a way to give yourself a starter in researching a topic that you know little about. But after you get the Gist of what the topic is about, you can follow its sources, or know enough about the topic to intelligently look for more official sources. After reading the official sources to gain the knowledge you are looking for you would cite them.
Wikipedia had a lot of good info, and for the most part it is truthful and accurate information... But it is still an encyclopedia, where topics in areas are summarized. This is good for the general knowledge questions. For the most part this is good, for general knowledge, arguing on a message board, or even while you are working on something just for a fast reference refresher. But if you are going to be doing an official research on a topic. Wikipedia may be a starting point, but not a good place to cite learned information.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you're quoting Wikipedia directly, you're doing it wrong.
Every non-obvious sentence on Wikipedia requires a reliable source that supports the facts. It's OK to learn about a topic at Wikipedia, but if you're going to spread that knowledge, you must a) read the original reference supporting the facts, and b) credit the reference directly, skipping Wikipedia in the chain of attributions. Reading the original source, you can detect when one of the facts stated in the article is not really supported by the reference.
This is the proper way to disseminate knowledge stored in an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit", just in case someone edited the facts in the few seconds before you loaded the article.
Besides, if you find a discrepancy between the source and the article, you *should* correct it at the article. Everybody can edit Wikipedia, after all.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
It could be written by a Climate Scientist working for ExxonMobile.
Just because he is working for a company that has its own self interests, it doesn't necessary make the science wrong. If read, we should know that it did indeed come from an Employee of ExxonMobile so if the idea is in conflict with other sources, we can assume that the science may not have gone across a complete peer review, and its findings may had been influenced by the employer. However if it jives with the findings of other sources with different self interests, it may offer good insight into the area that should be studied further.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When I was working on my M.S in Information Assurance, the school made it very clear that Wikipedia isn't a reliable source. Now what I used it for was to get a general idea of the subject, then follow the references. Quite often after following the references in Wikipedia, I'd end up with DOI's that I could look up for peer reviewed papers. Saved me quite a bit of time. I'm working on my second Master's now, this time a MBA and it isn't quite the hardline in the school of business, even though it is the same university.
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I am a PhD organic chemist with about 40 years of experience and I use Wikipedia all the time. I still work in a lab. There is now a lot of good organic chemistry information from the mundane to the esoteric. I trust it because there isn't much of a reason to put in inaccurate information on the density of triethylamine and things like that. Anytime there is a drug mentioned as a new cure for cancer, I look it up in Wikipedia as soon as I can. It's a great source. Occasionally I'll find an error and I'll notify the author or I'll correct it myself. They're usually just "structural" typos.
Because it has become a great time-saver for me, I donate a little bit every year to Wikipedia to help keep it running.
The only thing missing is a good way to do chemical substructure searching. That's a mainstay of any good chemistry data system. Unfortunately, it's a complicated process with a limited audience and has, in the past, required the big bucks.
My feeling is that it's not so good as a reference because it's dynamic. It's a great gateway to information written on paper or stone somewhere else though I tend to trust it enough that I don't need that paper for day to day use.
The fact that scientists don't cite Wikipedia isn't some kind of refusal to admit that they use it. Of course you wouldn't cite Wikipedia, because it's not a primary source. It's an encyclopedia. If you find something useful or interesting on Wikipedia you trace it back to where it's actually from and cite that.
Nobody puts new research on wikipedia, it is just used to cite other sources. Whoever wrote the article has zero understanding of what is in Wikipedia or how scientific papers are written.
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Actually, Wikipedia considers itself to be a tertiary source, but the basic point of drilling back to the best available starting point is exactly correct.
Wikipedia has explicit instructions on this topic.
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Isn't the whole point of wikipedia that it has the citations at the bottom of the article, containing the sources? WIkipedia isn't so much a source, as an easily digested collection of information from multiple sources. Putting down wikipedia as a source is like putting your library name down as a source instead of the book. It's technically true, and this isn't meant to be a dig at the people who write the articles. But wikipedia's own rules about citations more or less officially declare it as "not a source".
Everyone says that you can't site wikipedia because it can be defaced or randomly changed. But every change is documented with time and date of the last update with a unique link. There maybe cases where offensive material maybe permanently removed, but otherwise a snapshot of a citable page should always be available at wikipedia to view.
It is the same as citing a book, you include the edition etc as later editions can be significantly different.
Having said that, anything that is on wikipedia should be cited and verified anyway. In which case it's better to cite that source.
I use wikipedia and will cite it in papers.
Mostly its quite good, but as with any source you need to be careful because there are mistakes. I mostly use if for background information on well-understood topics.
I was going to make this very point. As a teacher, students come in my class and practically panic when I tell them to look something up on Wikipedia. They are not hesitant to say that other teachers have told them not to use Wikipedia, "because anyone can change it."
I talk to them about the accuracy and that errors are rapidly corrected; but I am gong against years of teachers telling them to never use it. However, I have an activity that has them using Wikipedia and going to the source on the page and using a few of the sources. I then talk to them about suing Wikipedia as a really good table of contents that will summarize, and take them to, the sources. That lesson seems to be effective in breaking down a lot of th e"never use Wikipedia" walls.
Of course you don't cite Wikipedia. Just like you would never cite an Encyclopedia. They are not primary sources. WTF kind of scientists do you think we are? Scientologists?
The accuracy of Wikipedia isn't relevant to the question of citations. Papers should strive to cite primary sources. One might use Wikipedia to research their sources and then to the primary sources used by the secondary sources cited by Wikipedia.
But one wouldn't cite Wikipedia directly, anymore than one would cite an olde tyme printed encyclopedia. This was something I was taught not to do starting around the age of 10. Go to the general reference to get started, sure. But don't rely on the reference's summation of the source.
of course it is, this is /. after all
[citation needed]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wikipedia is constantly in flux. How is it possible to cite a source that may change the next day?