Funny thing, the other day my U.S. History teacher went on a huge rant about people distrusting wikipedia. He praised it as a great invention. He is indeed an awesome man
[QUOTE=Craptasket;32054924]Unfortunately for me, I had some teachers that hated wikipedia and had it's sources at hand to check us. I personally would recommend only keeping sources from books and .gov/.org, then mixing it up with sources not listed on the wiki page.[/QUOTE]
How can they prove you discovered the sources through Wikipedia though
Seems like if they accused you of only using WP all you'd have to do is say no and there'd no way they could prove anything
Wikipedia, like a myriad of other sites, has it's truths and falsities. However, for the most part, Wikipedia can be pretty reliable. In 7th grade music class, I decided to test people by editing an article on the Blues. The music teacher actually told us to write down the sentence word for word about where Blues music originated. I changed the word America to Ballsack. One person in my class actually wrote Ballsack on his assignment instead of America. Needless to say, it was hilarious.
One time I changed the info for one guy and said he died in a cloud of fart gas. I was in 7th grade so it was funny to me.
Like others have said, they say that to get you to find information elsewhere. Finding it on Wikipedia is super easy and the teachers want you to put effort into your work.
I can imagine a teacher/professor saying not to go there because they don't want to mark 30+ essays based on the same information. You'll get paper after paper citing the same things and rehashing the same arguments they garnered from the Wikipedia articles.
And like Craptasket said, .gov and .org sites are usually the best to cite. They're the more 'official' websites not written by total randoms. That's another reason I don't entirely trust Wikipedia. I remember cross-checking citations that led to these random .com websites, and some of them said very different things. (Given, this was a few years ago.)
But if I was a teacher, I would get sick of marking the same arguments based off the same content on Wikipedia.
I've done projects at school which required us to go to the internet to look for information.
And every fucking time they give us the Wikipedia lecture and how we shouldn't use it because they say people post false information right in front of our eyes.
I think Wikipedia is a pretty reliable website and I just dont understand why you would waste time looking all over the internet while you can just get your answers from Wikipedia.
I used Wikipedia anyways and got A's on all those projects
Whenever I have to find a piece of information, I open up a few websites on the same subject and see if they all say the same thing. Instead of just going to one website and possibly writing down bad information...
The more websites you compare together, the lesser chance of writing down bad/false information.
[QUOTE=Rct33;32055563]I remember back in school a teacher set an essay on a particular subject, he went to such wikipedia page about it, edited it and quite a few people handed in some funny essays.[/QUOTE]
That's how to teach the right way.
There's actually an article about Wikipedia's reliability on Wikipedia.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia[/url]
[QUOTE=Will Wright;32070719]There's actually an article about Wikipedia's reliability on Wikipedia.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia[/url][/QUOTE]
Wikiception
[QUOTE=Rct33;32055563]I remember back in school a teacher set an essay on a particular subject, he went to such wikipedia page about it, edited it and quite a few people handed in some funny essays.[/QUOTE]
That's awesome. Hahaha.
Some teachers just want to see the world burn.
[sp]Commissioner Gordon.[/sp]
Wikipedia is pretty well protected and most information is cited.
If anything, just use the skill of discernment.
The only time I use wikipedia is if I can scroll down and get some websites/booktitles on which the article is based. Usually with websites it's fairly easy to figure out if it's heavily biased or not and if you have a library nearby you can usually find the titles used.
Your history teacher is right - There is always a chance of someone sneaking in some biased or non-cited information - Especially if you are looking at a wikipedia page in Danish (I strongly recommend that if you have to use wikipedia, use the English version and Danish articles often times need citations and are generally lacking in information). You should also stay away from topics such as religion and politics as these are high-risk zones of biased information.
So, wikipedia is good if you want some general information about something, but stay away from religion, politics and other controversial topics and make sure to check out the sources of the articles. Most importantly you need to look out for signs of bias. Is the article describing a certain aspect as especially positive or negative? Is it leaving out information on certain subjects or focusing too much on something? If you are ever going to read sources -- from books, media or internet, you need to oil up that critical thinking and check out everything that has something to do with the source author.
If you're in Denmark you'll be going on a Gymnasium either now or soon so you should be given tons of information about this.
The thing with Wikipedia is that yes they will cite certain things like statistics and quotes, but a lot of the information will be unreferenced so while you know in your heart that no one would just make that up, you can't verify it. In high school it's probably fine just to use Wikipedia and its sources (though many of them aren't academic), but in university you're required to cite all information that isn't common knowledge so getting information that is uncited by a journal article or book from Wikipedia is quite risky.
Teachers are university educated so will have spent a good five or so years of their lives learning the correct way to cite and being punished with bad grades if they slip up. They're only helping you not to learn bad habits now. For the most part it's not because they don't want you to copy/paste your assignments because they can generally tell when you do that anyway.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.