Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Why is Wikipedia not reliable
Why is Wikipedia not reliable
Is wikipedia a reliable source
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Why is Wikipedia not reliable
In today’s society information is everywhere. We have libraries, but we also have online resources. Information can be obtained from almost everywhere today, but how accurate are these websites in giving us actual facts and not just beliefs or people’s opinions. One of the most popular resources that we use to gather information is the famous Wikipedia. Type anything in any web search engine and you will most likely get results from Wikipedia. But is Wikipedia accurate? If we look at the websites URL, we can see that it’s a nonprofit organization, and a vast majority of people contribute, so there is no author, email, or phone number, or any way to contact. To verify how accurate all the information is. Putting Wikipedia to the test
Sean Kamperman the author of “The Wikipedia Game: Boring, Pointless, or Neither” believes that wikipedia can be helpful with educational learning purposes. Wikipedia is known for plagiarism and fake information. People make Wikipedia have a bad reputation in schools especially in english classes. Wikipedia can be a source of entertainment and self improvement for some people. Some people might just research stuff on Wikipedia to find interesting articles. In “Wikihunt” many Wikipedia users have “discovered” a game of their own, this involves creativity so it brings out the creative qualities of people. Wikipedia is a educational game and it's also free it's convenient for people. The game “Wikihunt” involves two people in separate computers
Wikipedia recognizes that it would not be wise for someone to use this virtual encyclopedia as a source for any educational use or just wanting some information (“Not Authoritative” n.d.). Those who put in false information are more likely to be anonymous and because they are anonymous it causes complication for Wikipedia. Wikipedia have set rules for the users to “follow”, but those rules are obviously ignored, which results Wikipedia not having total control nor organization with the users. For example, if someone chose to do a research paper and chose an article from Wikipedia that has
Now that we are living in an ever changing world, technology is viewed as the most resourceful tool in keeping up with the pace. Without the use of technology, communication would be limited to using mail for delivery and encyclopedias for research. Although technology has improved the way we communicate and find information for research, the information is not always valid. Unfortunately, for those of us who use the internet for shopping, research, or reading articles of personal interest the information is not treated the same as a your magazine or book. While such literature is reviewed by an editorial staff, internet literature or information can be published by anyone. In order to reap the full benefit of having the use of technology for any purpose, there are five basic criteria’s one must keep in mind as an evaluating tool for deciding whether or not the particular website is a reliable source for information.
Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, is extremely beneficial to people who want facts, not opinions, on a wide range of topics. Occasionally, a volunteer editor will insert his or her opinion while creating or editing a page, as was the case with Leonardo DiCaprio's Wikipedia page when someone edited the page and wrote "FINALLY HAS A GODD***ED OSCAR" repeatedly, spoiling the actor's Wikipedia page. While Leonardo DiCaprio did finally win an Oscar for his work, the edit clearly shows bias, violating Wikipedia's regulations. Public figures, including politicians, authors and entrepreneurs, should have a Wikipedia page so that when people are looking for factual information, it is easy to find. A person needn't be as famous as Leonardo
According to Darren Crovitz and W.Scott Smoot, authors of the article “Wikipedia Friend, Not Foe”, “Wikipedia provides a unique opportunity about writing for a real audience, meeting genre expectations, establishing credibility, revising for clarity and purpose, and entering public discussions about the nature of truth, accuracy, and neutrality”(www.ncte.org). Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that provides information on almost any topic. Understanding the various advantages that Wikipedia provides users with, makes it easy to see why so many seek to gain knowledge here. Even though Wikipedia has some drawbacks, students should be able to use Wikipedia because it is a revolutionary way to educate and inform students.
As one of the first places people turn to for information, Wikipedia is lacking articles about topics ranging from indigenous peoples to black history. Volunteer editors, primarily males in high-income countries with access to high speed Internet connections, create pages about people and events that are familiar to them, leaving gaps in coverage. To fill in the gaps, the Wikipedia foundation sponsors edit-a-thons; this past October was the Indigenous Peoples' Day edit-a-thon. During the San Diego, California event, volunteers from the United States, Canada and Mexico created pages about notable Native Americans, tribes and Indigenous historical figures to expand Wikipedia's coverage of disenfranchised peoples.
Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the site was designed to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia designed to be edited by experts (this information was sited from Wikipedia due to the lack of information available on Nupedia). This sounds like it would be a good source then if it is complementing information from a site that is edited only by experts, unfortunately if you tried to go to Nupedia.com you will be meet by a slow connection or a timeout. I was able to get to the site once and was not meet with limited information, so Wikipedia took over and began to grow. I will tell you there are good things about Wikipedia, it is a great site to get an understanding of information, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts (Harvard College Writing Program, 2014). After some of my research most sites do encourage Wikipedia as a starting point but to be careful due to the fac...
What most people do not seem to understand is that "Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it."(add source) There are thousands of people around the world who are either making a new page, rewriting or correcting information, or adding information at any given time during the day.
The internet is a powerful tool for information. In a matter of seconds, it can yield millions of hits that contain inestimable amounts of knowledge and opinion. No longer is the library the epitome of data. The internet surpasses all in ease of access, speed, and amount of data. However, not all websites are useful or reliable in procuring data. Littered through cyberspace there are a few superb sites for gathering information, yet many are complete trash. Recently there was a paper researched on the Creole People of Louisiana For the purpose of this study, the first five non-Wikipedia links were critiqued using only the search item term “Creole Louisiana.”
In March 2000 Wikipedia started out as Nupedia.com with a review board of experts. By 2001 less than twenty-four articles were completed. It was then that the creator, Jimmy Wales, and his editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, decided to make Wikipedia. They created it as an open-source encyclopedia that permitted anyone to create and edit its content. This freedom allowed Wikipedia to grow at an exponential rate. In 2006 there were approximately one million articles and by 2007 it had grown to over two million (“Wikipedia”). When compared to other online encyclopedias such as Britannica.com it surpasses in every way except that people are fallible and sometimes the information is not 100% accurate. On Britannica the free features are limited and there are ads throughout the web-page but for a certain amount of money per year a user can access the full benefits of the site. Wikipedia is completely free with no copyrights, allowing access in several languages and from anywhere in the world with no ads to be found. Due to the way Wikipedia was originally designed users are permitted to print, copy, and pass out the information they gather. Unlike if a distinct number of words are used from any of Richard Hofstadter's works a check must be sent to him to avoid penalties for plagiarism (Rosenzweig 117-46). The...
Online resources have become extremely remarkable for college students because they can easily have access to these sources without difficulty. However, some of these websites and resources can be inappropriate, for academic studies require reliable resources in order to get reasonable and accurate data. One of these inappropriate websites is Wikipedia because people cannot trust information, essays, and articles that were written by unknown authors. For academic writing, students must have accurate information about authors and their studies in order to use those articles. They cannot provide an acceptable academic paper if they use non-academic recourses such as Wikipedia and other blogs on the Internet. Even though some think that college students can use Wikipedia as an accurate resource, I believe that they should use other websites and resources that are more accurate and trustworthy than
When people write essays or need information they intend to search up multiple websites to get the answers. Google is the most famous search engine that people use and now google is recommending using Wikipedia. Wikipedia is also the best and the most resourceful website where millions of people use. Wikipedia benefits people by helping them on their topic.
With the internet being part of our everyday life information can be accessed from almost any corner of the world. Whether it’s used for playing games, communicating with friends, or even just streaming movies, the internet is intertwined with essentially everyone on the planet in some sort of fashion. With the abundance of articles and information that is easily attainable in today’s society problems occur when the information is incorrect or not justified. Wikipedia is taking the majority of the heat and is frequently called an unreliable source. Because of the easy read and quick basic overview, Wikipedia is a go to source for students as well as teachers and is a helpful tool to get minimal information. However Wikipedia should not be used as research tool on academic papers because of its lacking credentials.
To conduct my research, I used various search engines for Internet sources as well as read various textbooks. I mostly consulted with resources that are from an educational website or university. This assisted my research as to provide accurate and reliable information for me to use, as the Internet has been known to wrongly provide false knowledge. From this, I learned to cross-reference the websites that I use to ensure the dependability of it across multiple sources. This method proved to be effective in my opinion, as it proved a website to be valid by checking the information found on other websites. However, I have also realized that this method is not always fool-proof or fail-safe. And so, I examined the government and national archives to find my primary sources of statistics and first-hand accounts.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia in 2001 in order to give people the ability to either obtain or put out quick, understandable information about any sort of topic, ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth to the current conflict in Iraq. According to Capocci’s study on Wikipedia growth, Wikipedia’s total amount of articles has more than sextupled (around seven-million total) and the amount of views per day has more than quintupled in the past five years, making it one of the fastest growing and most commonly visited websites on the internet (par. 1). In agreement with Meier, the point that Wikipedia allows anyone to use its information for absolutely no charge or requirement of registration led to it becoming the 6th most visited website in 2009 (1). Also, the research in the Zotero Report on research citations showed how the amount of internal citations for Wikipedia at the least doubles almost every year since 2002 (Spiro 1). In line with this, citations for Wikipedia now outnumber many accepted ...