User:Kiwiboy121/A Source of Goodness, Not Evil

Opening

“[Black] people are inherently inferior to white people.” Where do you imagine that quote came from? Not from a highly respected research, and information source. Yet that quote can be found in an older edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that might still be sitting on a shelf in a library. Teachers never seem to have a problem with their students citing Encyclopedia Britannica as a reasonable source. A good encyclopedia should stay up to date with the latest knowledge. It must have input from a wide group of editors. To prevent its opinions from becoming prejudice. Accepting this premise, why then is Wikipedia, a research tool, which fits both requirements banned from bibliographies by so many teachers? Wikipedia is a valid, current, unbiased source for papers and should be permitted in citations.

Supporting Arguments

The main argument teachers hold against Wikipedia is that since false information and vandalism can appear on the site anonymously it’s hard for students to separate truth from fiction. Wikipedia is not anonymous. Every edit can be tracked to a specific IP address or user names. Warnings can be left on the automatically created discussion pages of anyone who makes a change no matter how small to the site. And after a warning or two the user can be blocked, from editing all together. Every new page that is created is checked scrutinously by a special group of users and robots which dub themselves New Page Patrollers who check for obvious errors, and vandalism. Pages which are either entirely false, mostly false, or don’t fit wikipedia standards are nominated for deletion, and if not quickly improved then just as quickly deleted. Pages which pass this initial inspection but become subject intense vandalism, are blocked from editing by anyone but highly knowledgeable non-anonymous administers. It’s very difficult for pages to slip through the cracks. Wikipedia also gives acknowledgment to articles that allows you to trace their information back to other websites, book, and publications Articles that don’t cite sources in such a manner are tabbed, and often deleted. Studies from all over the world continually prove that Wikipedia is a reliable source in many fields. A recent investigation by the British publication Nature . involved numerous experts checking for errors in 42 articles in parallel Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica articles which were related to their field of work. Four major errors were found in both Britannica, and Wikipedia. In a recent article The Wall Street Journal found that Wikipedia’s open-editing approach yields better results than traditional encyclopedias 57% of the time.

Conclusion

The real question we should be asking ourselves is what knowledge? Does knowledge come from a select, prejudiced, biased, group of editors, or does it come from continual input from many members of society. Encyclopedia Britannica defines knowledge as the sum of what is known. Wikipedia defines it as the product of assumption. Students need to question what they read, and how they judge information. No one source can be seen the definitive authority. Anything written, or spoken comes from someone who has an agenda. Students need to be able to see an issue from all sides and sources, and be able to document what sources they have used to arrive at their conclusion. That is an inherent part of research.