Wikipedia

I will admit that I am a guilty user of Wikipedia. Almost every professor I have had made it clear to our class that we are not to use Wiki as a source for any paper done. This was almost impossible for me to do. It is so easy for me to just go to Wiki when I am unsure about a word or needed to know a definition. Wiki seemed to include anything I ever needed to know.

I never really saw the real harm in using Wiki so when given this assignment in my EDM 310 class to find out about the reliability of it, I decided to learn a little more about this encyclopedia. I figured this would be a helpful way to test it out and see if I would use it in my future classroom. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The name is a portmanteau of the Hawaiian word for quick, “wiki“, and “encyclopedia”. The encyclopedia is updated in over 100 languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto. The English version of Wikipedia contains over one and a half million articles. Wikipedia was founded as an extension of the expert-written Nupedia project. However, the idea of a publicly-written collaborative encyclopedia was rejected by Nupedia's advisory board, and the project was managed independently by several top Nupedia contributors. Despite this, Wikipedia soon eclipsed Nupedia in terms of content and traffic. Within two years the Nupedia project was abandoned, and all its content was incorporated into Wikipedia. Much of today's Wikipedia staff are former Nupedia staff. The fact that anybody with an internet connection can edit its contents, has made Wikipedia become viewed as an unreliable source of information. The encyclopedia allows anybody to edit its pages, even anonymously. To address this issue, and to ensure quality, accurate content, all submissions and edits are moderated and regulated by a staff of regular volunteer.

During some of my Wiki research I came across a fact that in 2005 the scientific publication Nature performed a comparison of the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, the leading print encyclopedia. It found that while the amount of errors per article in Wikipedia and Britannica were the same, the severity of errors in Wikipedia were worse. Encyclopedia Britannica suffered mostly from fact omission, whereas Wikipedia suffered from inaccurate information.
This research made me have a whole new realization on Wiki. In the future I may not use this source as much and if I do I will be sure to double back and check it with something more reliable. I can see where my professors were coming from when they didn’t want us using Wiki. There is not a very large chance that I will be using this as a classroom tool. I do not want it to serve as a stumbling block for my students, I would rather them have the accurate information from the start.