We all know the temptation: it's 3 in the morning on a Wednesday and you're suckin' down the last drops of a 5-Hour Energy trying to belt out a mid term on the Protestant Reformation. You turn to your old friend Google to get you started and your mouse hesitantly hovers over the first search result: "Protestant Reformation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
You know you can't cite Wikipedia; it would compromise the integrity of your whole piece. But, on the other hand, it would be so easy. After all, Wikipedia is the SparkNotes of the known universe. Everything is organized so perfectly, summed up in a simple, consumable package. Inevitably, you cave and cite a few empty sources you may have glanced at, print your slapdash masterpiece and hit the sack by 5.
Like so many things in life, Wikipedia could be perfect. In a world where CiCi's five-dollar pizza didn't have the consistency of wet cardboard and that Nigerian prince who's been e-mailing you in fractured English really did have a misplaced inheritance to share, Wikipedia would be the go-to source for all things academic. Professors would sit at their mahogany desks and smoke fine tobaccos from curly pipes editing pages on Gloria Estefan and bean bag chairs, all the while citing National Geographic.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Wikipedia has been deemed "unsubstantial," "inaccurate" and "downright cockamamie" (citation needed) by the academic community, leading some to go as far as questioning its standing as an encyclopedia at all. Michael Gorman, a high-brow, swanky-swanky librarian, condemned Wikipedia in 2007 saying that people who endorse Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything."
Despite the self-righteous hyperbole, this is a logical assessment. Wikipedia can be freely edited by the masses and the masses have sordid academic backgrounds and biases to uphold. Hell, even Wikipedia agrees with its critics. To quote Wikipedia's article on Wikipedia (oh, I went there), "Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable."
But let's take a step back for a minute people. Could it really all be evil, just some Punji pit of inaccuracy meant to lure the lazy? The point that Gorman is missing is that Wikipedia means well. The idea behind our lovable wiki is to present people with a readily usable secondary source of information - one that is living and updatable - and they have more than succeeded in this task.
A 2005 test published in Nature (once again, I'm getting this all from Wikipedia) showed that scientific articles on Wikipedia were close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact, it is not uncommon for professors to allow students the use of Wikipedia for attaining general facts. Overall, there has been an endowed sense of trust in the online encyclopedia, leading it to become one of the most often visited Web sites on the Internet.
For those of you who don't know, editing Wikipedia is not a simple cut-and-paste operation. Lazy Web surfers and those unfamiliar with HTML will be immediately deterred from posting their off-color musings once they reach the edit page. Also, Wikipedia operates under the scrutiny of a billion searching eyes - even the most obscure articles receive attention from the public and discrepancies that slip through the Wikipedia editing net are often fixed by the detail-oriented.
This brings me to my experiment. Upon realizing that I couldn't fully support myself on secondary research, I decided to make a few choice edits to the Loyola University Maryland page. After adjusting our endowment to "1.43 million hot dogs" and making a few other choice edits (some of which I cited), I summarized my contributions to Wikipedia by saying I "updated some general facts and figures." Then, I moved on to the WLOY page and edited some more common sense logistics and submitted my work. Before I could even begin my page on Jerard Fagerberg (Pirate), I had two messages from Wikipedia informing me they were onto my game and unamused.
I'm not saying to get unscrupulous here - be critical of your sources. What I was trying to prove is that Wikipedia is critical too. They have standards. This makes them a strong secondary source of information - one that is forever more accessible than the library stacks. So don't be afraid to use it. Just don't go all Morgan Spurlock on the Big Macs, buddy.
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