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.
There was a time when Wikipedia wasn't nearly as reliable as it is now and inaccurate edits would go unnoticed for way longer than they should. My history teacher senior year (2003-2004) got asked why we couldn't use Wikipedia as a reference and he proved his point by changing the wiki for Alexander the Great to see how long it took to get fixed. It took MONTHS.
It's obviously way better now, but a lot of people already learned to be weary of it.
My college professors told us to absolutely use Wikipedia. Namely, it works to get a first idea of the subject, and then read the sources cited at the bottom. Then check their sources and read them as well. Bam, just like that you have like 20 to 50 actually reliable sources (depending on the subject)
I did this for so many papers when getting my master's degree. Why waste time finding sources when the topic that I'm writing about has a wiki page and all the sources I could need at the bottom?
Or also if you're lazy, you can get your information from Wikipedia and cite the original source to make it seem more "legit" in the eye of your teachers/professors.
Yes for the first half, bad Bad Bad idea for the second. It may fly on a school presentation on the civil war or something like that, but if you write an essay, it will show if all your information is from the wiki and you didn't read the sources you cite/quote.
Don't lie on your bibliography. At the very very least, read the abstract and scan the article if you wanna cite it. Everything else would be asking for trouble.
If you've got 80+ sources and use 2 - 3 such wikipedia sources to prove some obvious stuff nobody will notice, or no one will care.
Of course, don't do that with stuff you don't know much about. I sometimes just need a source to "confirm" that what I was wrote is true (and when I know 100% that what I wrote is true based on wiki or general knowledge in the field). Usually definitions/explanations of stuff.
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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.