“A ‘wiki’ is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. For example, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.” by Wikipedia for the article on Wiki
Lecturers are constantly reminding us not use Wikipedia as a reliable source of information for research work. “Never ever cite a Wikipedia article. Never!” said one of my lecturers. Those words keep playing in my head.
However, according to many formal and informal studies on Wikipedia e.g. Thomas Chesney’s, experts found Wikipedia articles to have a considerable amount of credibility. In Chesney's study " An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility" experts found Wikipedia articles to be more credible than the non-experts’ articles suggesting that the accuracy of Wikipedia is relatively high (on a scale of 1 to 7 it was given a 3). Chesney did warn readers that the study was small and that its ‘results should not be seen as a support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource’ but it should definitely be taken into consideration. I do agree with the fact that it’s a good starting point and its availability in over forty languages means it has a huge advantage over other websites of similar nature and while academic institutions may not accept Wikipedia as a high quality source of information, I’m sure other organisations do. I agree that it is a good research tool and but the fact that anyone can have access to change it contents means there’s possibility for the information (especially for controversial issues) to be very biased or less biased depending on the reader’s stand on the issues.
For example, I once Wiki-ed the history of Malaysia for a presentation. I noticed that it had a common theme and tone to put the former Malaysian Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammed under a bad light (in quite a subtle manner). The biasness was very evident and I’m sure while there are many who would agree with it there would also be many who would not view the article as a reliable source of information.
Just from that experience alone (plus hearing my lecturer’s voice repeating in my head), I disregarded Wikipedia as a credible source of information. As a result, I try to avoid using it and only refer to it as a last resort. Besides, if it doesn't make for credible reading, it would at least be interesting!
"Thanks to the Internet, it is now possible to be extremely well-informed and completely wrong at the same time!"
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