Pages

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Should you trust a wiki for Academic Research?

A wiki is a collaborative website where people work together and users are allowed to add to, create ,delete, or modify the website content via their web browser. The most common wiki is wikipedia , a free web encyclopedia. Wikis have become very common and they have multiplied in size and in number. However academic institutions and librarians have disregarded the sites as unsuitable for research purposes. This is because anyone is free to post their information which may be biased information as well as narrowly-defined specialised topics. A number of wikis have qualified editors and they also try to limit the number of contributors but there is stil no guarantee of getting information that is free from bias or information that is fully detailed. One of the largest wikis such as wikipedia has got a big number of unknown editors. Recently John Lennon and Elvis Presley's entries on wikipedia where invaded with the intention of wanting to find out how quickly corrections were made. Editors were quick to correct information. In other cases, rival political factions falsified wiki entries with the intention of giving their candidate an advantage.

  • Should wikis be allowed as valid sources for academic research, why or why not?
  • Would you submit an assignment to your tutor or lecturer that sites a wiki as a source?

7 comments:

  1. to a certain extend yes student should trust wiki because its not all who are allowed to post information on it but professionals approved by wiki through sending in information,,however this is not that reliable as someone can send in fraud qualification and also not published information.Wiki therefore can be used as a starting point and also to get other "scholars options."

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think students can use wikipedia but they should also take note of the information they are extracting from it as i mean irrelavant info is really visible

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wiki is an unreliable source to a large extent because the people who write there are not professionals any one can write whatever they think but not accurate so it should not be used that much esp for assignments as a source.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wiki is not totally bad. I would only use it as a starting point, to get some ideas on what you should direct your research but I would never base my facts entirely from there. And you should even know that most examining boards and most professors do not advice that you use it; they try as much to catch people who get information from there as the information is not trustworthy, about anyone can post things on wiki and the person who has posted that information there would probably have not acknowledged his source well - which is clearly a bad thing hehehe.

    ReplyDelete
  5. NOP NO NO NO! Yes Wiki is not 100% reliable like any other source but the fact that anyone has the freedom to edit makes information more inaccurate. Information on Wiki should be taken with caution and not use Wiki as the only source.

    ReplyDelete
  6. l have found wiki to be reliable after doing my research from other sites it always matches up and they are always updated on current issues.

    ReplyDelete