Wikipedia!

// December 28th, 2009 // Community, Education, Information, Life, School

Why don’t teachers like when students use Wikipedia as a source for information? Why is there such a misconception about there being so much false information on Wikipedia? That’s really not true at all, and it bothers me when people say that it is. Sure, anyone could edit an entry, but almost all pages would be edited by an official editor seconds later and have the misinformation removed. Wikipedia is not just a site full of false information for crying out loud! It’s a real encyclopedia – probably better! What do teachers have against it?

Away from that point though, I got a better question for you; why don’t I have a Wikipedia page? I know you’re not allowed to tell people to make a page for you, so… hint, hint?

One Response to “Wikipedia!”

  1. Alekz says:
    December 31, 2009 at 7:35 am

    Yeah teachers say that a lot, and yes, Wikipedia has earned a lot of credibility as a good Encylopedia nowadays, BUT you must never, ever trust Wikipedia 100%. I find false or debatable information on Wikipedia all the time. Even spelling mistakes (that I’ve fixed, yeah I’m a grammar and spelling geek, both in English and Spanish).

    One time, I copy pasted something onto my research (about Complex and Imaginary numbers, math stuff…) from Wikipedia, and I noticed something strange just when I was about to print it. It was something like:

    “One construction of C is as a field extension of the field R of real numbers, in which a root of x2+1 is added. To construct this extension, begin with the polynomial ring R[x] of the real numbers in the variable x. Because the polynomial x2+1 is irreducible over R, the quotient ring R[x]/(x2+1) will be a field. I hate compelxnumbrz they’reshitand Ihate the bastardwho inventde tem”

    Note the last sentence (I don’t remember the exact words used but it was something similar lol). Of course it was fixed quickly because it’s an important article and I noticed before I printed my paper so it was no big deal, but it was then that I realized Wikipedia is not to be trusted 100% all the time. What if the article is not so popular and nobody reviews the edits? Plus, there are some very biased articles when it comes to edits, I have a friend whose account was banned and removed because he edited something about the history of the government in Spain that was inaccurate (and politically important).

    Profesionally speaking, when you are making an article or citing sources for an official or scientific paper or something, Wikipedia is really not that trustworthy. A book is still better if you are going to put references. And for this matter, Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is a very good place to look. I used it a lot for my thesis this semester.

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