Why do people on YA use Wikipedia as an authoritative source for history questions? From my experience, most (not all) of the articles are inaccurate or incomplete. For most of the questions asked, a simple web search will give you several, reliable and resources that can be cited for a paper (unless I'm mistaken, most teachers won't accept wikipedia as a source).
2007-11-16 17:46:34 · 3 answers · asked by gentleroger 6 in Arts & Humanities ➔ History
While Wikipedia itself is not a good source by itself, it can lead to good sources in the references. You can not use wikipedia as your holy grail but only as a final reference once you have other sources to confirm what it says.
2007-11-16 18:22:25 · answer #1 · answered by satcomgrunt 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I can tell you as a Professor of History you'd be surprised how wrong certain articles can be ... I mean some of them have blatantly false information.
Wikipedia can be helpful in certain situations, and has its uses, but authoritative academic sourcing should not be one of them. People who know absolutely nothing about a subject can add anything they want ... in the end you have no idea if the information has been contributed by an expert or by a third grader.
In graduate school it was an extreme faux pas to even allude any of your information came from wikipedia ... not to mention (as was previously stated) professors would not accept wikipedia as a valid source for research projects. In fact, you could be penalized if any information from wikipedia was used as a source in your final draft.
Now that I am a professor I have the same attitude. Whenever I notice my students have obviously erroneous information in their work I question them about it, and the usual answer is "I got it off wikipedia." For that reason, I also do not allow wikipedia to be used as a valid source under any circumstances ... it simply is not accurate. In fact, it's wrong on many things it shouldn't be wrong on ...
2007-11-16 20:12:38 · answer #2 · answered by blursd2 5 · 2⤊ 0⤋
In my graduate school, most professor state that any citation from Wikipedia will result in a failing grade on the paper.
Then again, we have one-line access to professional journals.
2007-11-16 17:53:15 · answer #3 · answered by wichitaor1 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋