A 10-page Wikipedia article titled "Reliability of Wikipedia" cites 51 sources, but is it reliable?
The open-source online encylopedia, which allows anonymous users to create, review and edit articles, boasts more than 10 million articles in 250 languages. With the ease of access and egalitarian philosophy have come increasing accusations of unreliability and a host of ethical and academic dilemmas.
The site has also become, in some cases, a source of breaking news.
An Internet Broadcasting Services employee was fired last week for updating Tim Russert's entry with his death date more than 30 minutes before NBC, which was waiting to inform the news host's family.
"Everyone has heard about the problems [with Wikipedia]," said Jim Brown, a graduate student and assistant instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. "It's well-documented and well-founded that you should take it with a grain of salt. But it's also a great starting point for research and general facts."
Brown, whose dissertation concerns Wikipedia, said he encourages students to focus on the articles' footnotes, which can guide them to more credible sources.
Government professor David Edwards said that speed is part of Wikipedia's appeal and that he allows his students to access current information on Wikipedia on international relations that they can't find in last year's print encyclopedia.
"It's a very uneven resource, constantly undergoing revision and expansion, but it's also a valuable one," Edwards said.
History senior Elise Sasser said she uses Wikipedia to find other sources and for quick, easy information.
"Once I used it as my only source to write a paper for an online class, and I never got into trouble for it, but it was the most ridiculous class and the most ridiculous paper," Sasser said. "The teacher didn't really care, I guess. She never said anything, and I did well on the paper."
Journalism professor Rusty Todd said Wikipedia is "often right, sometimes wrong and occasionally the victim of pranks." He tells his students never to use it as a source.
"If you use it as source material, whether for a history timeline or for a scientific paper or for journalism, I think you're on thin ice," Todd said. "It's not an authoritative source. I have no confidence in anything I read on Wikipedia. But it is what it is. When you search for anything on Google, it's generally one of the first things that comes up."
Despite its shortcomings, Brown said he prefers to focus "more on what [Wikipedia] does do than what it doesn't."
"It's not all bad or all good," Brown said. "If you take Wikipedia at face value, you're going to come away with a lot of faulty information, but if you ignore it altogether, you're going to miss out on a valuable resource."
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