When I was going to grade school and even in high school, I was taught how to go to a library and look up information via Encyclopedias. When technology decided to take off and become essential to every day living, I never thought that it was include references. Wikipedia is just that, and online encyclopedia. It is defined as “is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). Even though I just cited it as a reference, I believe that students should not cite it for most papers.
If a person has the ability to go to a library and get an encyclopedia to use for a reference, they should use it. It would be the most reliable source because there are many authors and editors that go over the material. There are also credible people that are involved in the process to get an encyclopedia processed and ready for use. According to Encyclopedia Britannica’s website “Today they are the men and women of Britannica's Editorial Board of Advisors—the Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, the leading scholars, writers, artists, public servants, and activists who are at the top of their fields.” (http://corporate.britannica.com/board/index.html). In the past, they have had such big names such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, which are huge names in the science industry.
Many people will argue that Wikipedia is so easy and it’s free. In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Encyclopedia Britannica is available online, but at a cost. This website doesn’t allow random people to add things to their encyclopedias and they are published and reviewed by people who have sufficient knowledge in their field or study
Some of the information that is provided through Wikipedia is probably valid and a person could use it. They need to be careful of the information that is used and probably use a backup method to make sure it is accurate information. If you are using another source to validate it, then why even use it? Now, in my first paragraph I used Wikipedia as a reference, should I be faulted for it? Probably not, because most people know that Wikipedia is free, web-based, and definitely collaborative. While researching Wikipedia through Google, it brought up an article from the New York Times that quotes the same thing I did from Wikipedia. (http://www.nytimes.com/info/wikipedia/).
Any person can go into Wikipedia and add information to it without having any validity. In one assignment we had to watch a youtube video in which Stephen Colbert was adding some useless knowledge to an article that was obviously not true. When he was done adding it, he said that it was already posted on the site with no one even looking at it to edit it. I believe that if someone wanted to put that pigs fly on there, people would believe it because it’s on Wikipedia.
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