Should Wikipedia Be Allowed as a Research Source?
It's 10 p.m. the night before your big history paper on Franz Ferdinand is due, and all you know is that he shares a name with one of your fave bands. The only thing that can save you from failing this assignment? Wikipedia. The enormous online encyclopedia has over 1.6 million entries in English, so it's basically bound to have information on anything you could ever want to know about. But is all that information actually correct? Not necessarily.
Anyone can alter and add to Wikipedia entries, so there's no telling what's true and what's not. But those inaccuracies aren't stopping students from using the site as a quick fix: the site gets 24.3 percent of all visits to educational reference websites, according to Hitwise, a company that tracks online trends. Hitwise also reports that in February, three of the top keywords that sent traffic to Wikipedia were for prominent black historical figures, and two other search topics were related to presidents. Hmm, isn't that what you'd look up if you were writing a paper for Black History month or President's Day, both in February?
That's why some schools are banning kids from citing Wikipedia in their work, including Vermont's Middlebury College, which made headlines recently for prohibiting students using the site as a source for research papers.
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