Wikipedia Thoughts
Wikipedia has proved to be a bit of a dilemma for me. I've swung back and forth on the issue so many times! I was definitely one of the later ones to get swept into the web 2.0 flood. I was in college when Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, and all of those things were really getting popular. But I didn't ever really want to explore. I was very "academic" in my pursuits, and when I wasn't working on papers and projects, I preferred playing mindless games on my computer over editing an encyclopedia, online or otherwise. All this to say, I hadn't even heard of Wikipedia when my English professor explained it to us and told us why it isn't a good research source. From that time through all my undergraduate years, Wikipedia had a stigma associated with it. It wasn't outright banned, but it wasn't allowed to show up in the bibliography of one of your papers, either.
I started realizing, though, how often I actually went to Wikipedia when I just wanted quick information on a subject. It became sort of an illicit pleasure, like reading a YA fantasy adventure novel when you should be reading your cataloging text (not that I ever would do such a thing). I liked Wikipedia, and found it to be correct more often than not. Of course, it is easy to come across articles littered with grammatical errors or obviously incomplete. However, the benefits seem to outweigh the issues, in most cases. One major benefit that I hadn't noticed before I came across a few days ago. I was looking for a certain subject and came across a few webliographies set up in html, as well as an "About.com" page. Over 50% of the links were broken. This is something that just doesn't exist in Wikipedia, as a broken link will be quickly repaired by another editor. The fact that Wikipedia articles are constantly updated by everyone keeps them current, something that in theory the web is, but in practice is not always
I still don't think it's a good idea to use Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper--but then it's not a good idea to use most general web pages or encyclopedias, either. Wikipedia certainly has its uses, though, and banning it from a school is counterproductive. Used as a "hub," it becomes effective as a resource for authoritative links and basic information.
