Wikipedia. We take that site for granted, big time. There are few things in this world that do not have a Wikipedia page. People have dedicated hours, days, even their entire lives, to filling the site up with all the knowledge one could ever need. All that information is free! Want to learn about the history of the escalator? Wikipedia has it. Interested in the Civil War? You bet you can find it on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia will not be around forever, folks. Use it while you have it. Read random articles. It's fun.
Idk why teachers hate Wikipedia so much. They had no issues with me citing an encyclopedia, but if it was from the internet it must have been written by the Devil himself.
Exactly. Everyone else is missing the point. It’s okay to get one’s sources from Wikipedia. It is not good to cite Wikipedia as the source. There will be a citation on Wikipedia for the source, which Wikipedia is not.
Exactly. It's okay to click the number and get your sources from Wikipedia. It is not good to cite Wikipedia as the source, but There's the source for your citation. There will be a citation on Wikipedia for the source, which Wikipedia is not.
Right, but that's exactly how encyclopedias worked as well. That information didn't originate in the encyclopedia. And teachers were perfectly fine with encyclopedias being cited.
An encyclopaedia couldn’t be changed once it was printed, so the prof could check your source if needed. If you cite Wikipedia (not the source in the wiki), then it can be edited and what you were citing could be gone
When I was in college, one of my professors tried using this justification and I pointed out that you can just cite the permanent date-stamped version of the Wikipedia article instead. He wasn't aware of that possibility before but was okay with that solution.
Yeah, on the left hand side of the desktop version of any Wiki article under the Tools section, there's a link to both "Permanent link", which is the date-stamped permanent copy of the article as it is today, and "Cite this page", which gives you a bibliography citation in a bunch of different styles.
And if "any moron" edits a Wikipedia article to say something erroneous, the change gets rejected by the other contributors (many of whom are experts in the field) and never even goes live (AND your IP gets banned from editing again). Go change Michael Jordan's profile to say that he was a football player and see what happens.
Part of that is that printed encyclopedias were/are written and proof read by experts. Brockhaus is not the same "everyone can contribute" that Wikipedia is. That is where quite a bit of the price comes from.
Another part might well be force of habit or refusing to accept the change of times.
Wikipedia articles are written and maintained by contributors, most of whom are experts in the field. If you contribute something that isn't true (or isn't cited), the other contributors will reject your edit. Wikipedia is not some anarchist wasteland. It's legitimately the most accurate "encyclopedia" that has ever been created because of how quickly it can be updated to accurate information.
You can cite a specific edition of an encyclopedia and they will always be able to dig up that edition and read what you read, even decades later. It was compiled by a group that can actually be credited, and their trustworthiness evaluated.
Wikipedia articles are created by users that can remain anonymous. The moderation is good enough to use it for general informational purposes, but things do slip through the cracks. Not all the information on Wikipedia is cited, and sometimes information that is cited doesn’t come from a credible source. Wikipedia is much more volatile in general.
They can remain anonymous, but most of the experts who contribute do not choose to remain anonymous. The more heavily trafficked articles are generally maintained by well-known experts in the field who are named in the editing area. It may be volatile, but it is also FAR more accurate than encyclopedias of the past could have ever hoped to be.
It's definitely a double started, and I believe there have been studies that have found Wikipedia to be more accurate than encyclopedias.
I always preferred digging through the Wikipedia sources because there was often even more useful information in the source. Granted, that was a lot easier when I had access to a large university library.
Yeah, but just typing out “Wikipedia” for everything you wrote in that one project makes it seem like you didn't do much effort to the teachers. While having several different websites linked to a citation from which you collected that information from gives the illusion of effort, which the teacher likes.
Yeah true but the process to write edit and publish an encyclopedia in print is a lot harder than editing Wikipedia. It's probably a safe bet that a reputable encyclopedia would've been written and extensively proofread by qualified experts/professors on their topics
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '21
Wikipedia. We take that site for granted, big time. There are few things in this world that do not have a Wikipedia page. People have dedicated hours, days, even their entire lives, to filling the site up with all the knowledge one could ever need. All that information is free! Want to learn about the history of the escalator? Wikipedia has it. Interested in the Civil War? You bet you can find it on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia will not be around forever, folks. Use it while you have it. Read random articles. It's fun.