Credibility Of Wikipedia

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Recommended: Debate against Wikipedia as a reliable source

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia with information created and maintained by volunteers around the world. Errors in the articles are inevitable due to the reliance on volunteers. This has lead to a stigma around the use of Wikipedia for academic purposes. Middlebury College’s history department went as far as to deny students from using Wikipedia as a source for exams and papers (Cohen, 2007). Even with the controversy surrounding Wikipedia’s credibility, it has been able to various roles in universities today. For Middlebury College, the history department's decision to restrict the use of Wikipedia citations was moral and justifiable. Too many Wikipedia articles had been providing non-factual information to students, affecting their …show more content…

Harvard College advises against using Wikipedia for anything other than reference materials for this very reason (Harvard College, 2017). Many have made the case that Wikipedia is within the same accuracy range as Encyclopedia Britannica (Terdiman, 2005). This is not a valid argument for this case since the school stated that students should not be citing any encyclopedias whatsoever (Cohen, 2007). Wikipedia’s role as a source has historically been and should continue to be a tool that contains a vast collection of easily accessible information. This information tends to be only used as a last resort when conducting research. However, there is nothing wrong with using the references provided in a Wikipedia article to find the scholarly data to support a college assignment. This use is suitable for any discipline as it allows the user access to a collection of reliable sources based on one related …show more content…

Students are able to gain a better understanding of writing content for an encyclopedia while Wikipedia’s credibility is being improved. As stated in the New York Times article by Noam Cohen, students found that the experience had taught them discipline in writing the articles. This was due to the need to get in contact and interview experts to improve their work on a particular article. Although there has been a lot of controversy over the credibility of information from Wikipedia, society can still benefit from its existence. Wikipedia has the potential to become more reputable through the use of college assignments aimed at creating and editing content on the site. This enhanced reliability would benefit society with a vast collection of highly accurate

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