Wikipedia

This week we heavily focused on Wikipedia and how it is an excellent tool for starting a research paper but everything you see there should also be taken with a grain of salt. All throughout my schooling I have been told that using Wikipedia should never happen when it comes to learning information. Most of my peers have also been told this. We understood that Wikipedia can be edited anytime by anyone for any reason. This would make it a source of nothing more than people's opinions of whatever topic someone is searching for. This week I learned that there is an extensive vetting process that goes on when someone makes an edit to a Wikipedia page and the information it contains.

There are hundreds of editors for Wikipedia who are constantly checking the work of others and making sure the tone and focus of the topic are neutral and do not sway too far to one side or the other of whatever the argument is. If one of their pages sways too far to one side they will be marked accordingly and publicly displayed as being swayed to one side or containing hateful information. They go so far as to annotate the individual paragraphs and sentences. Wikipedia is not something to cite as a source for a paper but it is a great place to start.

All of the sources used to create the Wikipedia article are cited at the bottom. Many of those sources are peer-reviewed articles, which are better for writing a peer than just the base article. This does not mean that all the articles are false many of them have some form of factual information. To determine what is fact from fiction you must go through the cited articles and look at what they say vs. what Wikipedia says.

I think Wikipedia is a great place because it shows you a lot of general information about a topic, and it shows you if you should continue to do further research or if it makes more sense to find another topic.