I’m an academic librarian, and I do recommend that students sometimes start with Wikipedia, but as a way to get the terms they need to take out to databases with more scholarly information in it or to locate appropriate alternative sources (the references used in wikipedia may or may not be appropriate source types for them).
Then I tell them that they shouldn’t be using it as a source. Not just because they can’t verify who wrote the article - and authority of your source is important - but also because as college students, they generally should not be using a general encyclopedia as a source in their papers. Like they can go to wikipedia, they could also go to Encyclopedia Britannica for the same purpose: to get some background information to use to find better sources. The research they are doing in college is deeper and more focused, generally requiring more scholarly sources than wikipedia or any other general encyclopedia will offer.
I’ve heard more Wikipedia disdain from High School teachers.
The thing is, you don’t get to complain about Wikipedia. If you look at the article and see that it is incorrect and you have proof? Then you have an obligation to add that proof as a reference and correct the article. I have only had one cited addition reverted out of hundreds, and that was because they editor who reverted it didn’t think my reference was good enough quality.
I’d much rather see classes adopt Wikipedia articles to improve, assigning students the job of verifying the article and adding new or better references. Put all that dusty book research to good use. It will teach them the information and teach them how to do research.
I’m sure many people DO have an anti-wikipedia bias, based solely on vague third-hand impressions, although I’m more familiar with people generally being positive. My wild guess is that most of the negative view comes from people who have students regurgitate wikipeda uncritically, and (naturally but unfairly) blame wikipedia for it.
There is another source of potential anti-Wikipedia bias - WikiLeaks. I mentioned to a Fox News watching friend that I edit Wikipedia. I spent the next ten minutes clarifying the difference, that Wikipedia used freely distributable software, that there were literally thousands of “wikis” out there, that WikiLeaks was just one of many things with the “wiki” prefix or suffix, etc.
I’m an academic, and I use Wikipedia. However, the gold standard is peer review in academic circles - someone reviews your research design, method, literature review, and findings. So Wikipedia is a fine starting point - and a good place to get the base information needed to start a project… but I tell students one or two Wikipedia cites are fine, but more than that demonstrates that you’re not delving into the literature at all.
I know many colleagues who have contributed to and edited Wikipedia articles… so I’d say some academics are fans.
Unless they’re octagenarians and have never heard of the internet, I have to believe that most people know what wikipedia is in this part of the world.
Another academic librarian here, and I’ve never heard anyone in academia badmouth Wikipedia in the way described by the OP. I have heard a lot of complaints about how students use Wikipedia, but that’s really a separate issue.
My boss at my old job (who was, FWIW, a terrible person) did tell me repeatedly that I was supposed to be instructing students to NEVER even look at Wikipedia for their schoolwork and to ALWAYS use our online subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica. She actually told me not to say anything about Wikipedia beyond that, and wanted me to drop the portion of my standard presentation where I explained how students could use the list of references in a Wikipedia article to find more scholarly sources. But even she didn’t rant about how Wikipedia was totally unreliable, she just said I was supposed to tell students never to use it.
All the other academic librarians I know feel it’s a bad idea to tell students never to use Wikipedia, because they’re going to do it anyway and telling them not to only makes them think we’re totally clueless. The general approach is to do as Sampiro and Lsura said and tell students that while Wikipedia is a convenient source of background information it is not appropriate to use as a citation in a scholarly paper.
This thread has become a back-and-forth between those who say that the academics they know like Wikipedia and those who say the academics they know hate Wikipedia. You can add my name in the second category. Every professor and high school teacher I know despises Wikipedia. The best response I’ve heard of comes from a British lit professor at a community college in Virginia. When his students cited Wikipedia articles, he would edit those articles and then penalize the students because they cited things which didn’t back up what they actually said.
In my experience and the experience of most profs I’ve talked to, Wikipedia as a source is utterly worthless. First of all, so much of it is wrong. Now if you look up the Wikipedia article on something like Monty Python, maybe the article will be accurate because it was written by some fanboy with too much spare time who’s devoted to getting the details right. (Maybe.) But every article on a serious, meaningful topic that I’ve looked up is crap. Take the article on the Miller-Urey experiment. In addressing the controversy over whether the results of the experiment are valid given our current knowledge about earth’s early atmosphere, it says:
The citation is to this, which is not even a journal article or book, but just somebody’s lecture notes. More importantly, the consensus opinion (I judge by serious papers like this one) is the opposite of what Wikipedia says. Virtually every time that I look at an article on a serious subject, I find an error of that sort; sometimes I find many. (And I ignore anyone who blathers about how I should correct those mistakes. Telling someone who doesn’t like Wikipedia to edit it is like telling someone who doesn’t like Lake Michigan to get a bucket and drain it.)
However, there is a problem with Wikipedia much larger than the mere fact that it’s packed with untrue statements. That problem is that it’s badly written, badly organized, badly edited, and inconsistent. For instance, here’s the article about Albert Memmi in its entirety:
So, forget about strong and memorable writing. That’s barely even coherent. The third paragraph is one sentence; single-sentence paragraphs are a no-no in nonfiction. Worse, that sentence has no relationship to anything else in the article. Similar with the sentence “It was published in 1957, a time when many national liberation movements were active.” That might have a place in a well-written article about Memmi, but here there’s no connection made between that and anything else. And you’ve got to love wording like: “he pursued a career as a teacher; first as a teacher”. This is not an isolated example. Virtually every biographical article I’ve looked at is just as bad.
Wikipedia sucks. You seem to think that professors dislike Wikipedia because they want their students to suffer through the drudgery of going through the library stacks. Oh, grow up. Your professors (in most cases) do not hate you. They want you to learn as much as possible. That’s why they want you to read serious books and articles when you do research rather than the always dull, usually wrong, often incoherent stuff on Wikipedia.
No, we’re telling you to fix the problems on the one or two articles that you can fix. You’re acting as if we’ve told you to fix every article. The idea is that every article will eventually attract an expert who will get annoyed enough to repair the problem. Read through this thread, and you’ll see that some correct writing, some add references, some rate quality, etc.
I can’t fix all of it, but I can fix the bits that I know how to fix. I don’t have the same option with Britannica. Enough people like me and it will eventually become as accurate as Britannica.
My advisor, a distinguished academic with three scholarly books, makes Wikipedia articles assigned reading for his graduate courses.
I conjecture that the attitudes toward Wikipedia are probably more positive among academics in the mathematics and the hard sciences because it is easier to see when something is wrong. Theorems and proofs can be held to a strict standard of correctness that other subjects, such as philosophy, music, history, literature, and even psychology, cannot, and are not as subject to changing social, political, or cultural trends.
I’m an English professor, and I am not threatened by Wikipedia. However, one my of responsibilities is to teach students how to write research papers, and I see Wikipedia as similar to a print encyclopedia. When I was in college, we weren’t allowed to use encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Brittanica as a source, and I view Wikipedia the same way. It’s a good way to familiarize yourself with a subject, and then you should go on to do further research and incorporate that–but not the Wikipedia article–into your research paper.
I would never discourage a student from reading Wikipedia articles to find out about something. Heck, I do it all the time.
Having said that, a few years ago I was explaining to a class why Wikipedia wasn’t a great source to cite in a research paper, and I asked them for a topic to look up on Wikipedia. Someone shouted out “Will Wright.” I didn’t know who that was (turns out he’s the guy who created The Sims), but I typed his name in and the Wikipedia article about him came up and displayed on the screen. Before I turned to look at the article, I noticed that one of the young ladies in the class was reading it and threw her hand over her mouth, and a few other people were giggling. I thought “Oh no, I should have skimmed the article before showing it to the class,” and I asked what they were reacting to. It seems someone had edited the article to include “Will likes to dress up in women’s clothes and play Chutes and Ladders in his spare time.” Of course, that was a perfect example to prove my point.
I don’t share ITR champion’s view of Wikipedia, but I do agree with him that it’s foolish to tell people who dislike Wikipedia that they should become Wikipedia editors. Why should someone spend their spare time doing unpaid work for an organization that they don’t approve of?
I’ve often seen Wikipedians express the attitude that anyone who notices a bad article should fix it. But many people who notice problematic articles are unqualified to fix them – those who are going to Wikipedia because they know little about a particular subject but don’t care enough to do serious research. And based on my own experience, fixing a Wikipedia article even when you do know a lot about the subject can be an uphill battle. I’ve encountered a number of cases where no significant changes could be made unless you were willing to get into a protracted edit/revert war with some jerk or psycho who thought they were the boss of the article.
In chemistryland, I haven’t heard many professors say much about Wpedia, but what little I’ve heard has been positive. I know of one prof who requires students to add/edit chemistry articles.
I use it all the time. It’s often the fasted way to check something that I know already but can’t be bothered to memorize.
Good. They were citing improperly. Every method of website citation I’ve ever seen requires including the date of when the site was accessed. If he could re-edit the article and ding them for incorrect citing, they were doing it wrong.
As ctnguy mentioned, the Dewey Decimal Classification system (or the Universal Decimal Classification that is based on Dewey) is also used in many academic libraries outside the US. The Library of Congress Classification system is not particularly well-suited to foreign libraries, as it devotes more categories to America-related subjects than their foreign equivalents.
For instance, Class P (Language and Literature) devotes an entire subclass (PE) to the English language, another (PR) to British literature and yet another (PS) to American literature. Meanwhile, all the languages and literatures of East Asia, Africa, and Oceania get lumped into subclass PL. The use of Roman letters is also not very user-friendly in countries that use a different writing system.
OK, did the changes you made that got reverted have references?
I no longer make any additions or changes without first finding a reference, and adding that at the same time. For instance, I added something to the article on T. S. Elliot’s The Waste Land. I know very little about the subject, but I had found a source for a particularly obscure pair of lines in that deeply obscure poem. This is exactly the type of article that is jealously guarded by a small cabal that fights outsiders infringing on their turf. But because my addition was useful and well-cited, it has remained in the article and survived scrutiny by genuine experts.
Yes, some things are a matter of principle. Do you do a lot of volunteer work for organizations that you dislike?
I’m more often removing inaccurate and unreferenced claims. You know, the types of claims made by crazy people who are obsessed with some particular subject. Unfortunately when it comes down to who is willing to spend the most time and energy on an edit war then the crazy person is usually going to win.