It’s a question that’s been plaguing the minds of academics since 2001: is Wikipedia a valuable resource for students? How reliable is Wikipedia for students? One of the major (and most obvious) criticisms of the platform is that it is completely open-source. Anyone can edit virtually anything on the site at any time. There are natural concerns in that regard, especially considering that not everyone is an expert at something. It’s quite simple for someone to slip in a spurious factoid that suggests that Nelson Mandela is a big fan of oranges, even if that might not be true (or even relevant).
Of course, there are bigger implications for vandalism or dubiousness on the website, some of which can go unnoticed or unchanged for years. In fact, Wikipedia has a list of notorious Wikipedia hoaxes that it maintains. On the top of the list, you’ll find the entry for Gaius Flavius Antoninus, the apparent assassin of Julius Caesar. It stayed as a viable Wikipedia article for just over 8 years (from 2004 to 2012), but it also happens to be an outright lie. Academics will tell you that the presence of even one of these hoax articles negates the entire service.
The Difference between Wikipedia and Others
Some researchers and academics suggest that Wikipedia is actually more reliable than any other electronic encyclopedias. Options like Microsoft Encarta don’t necessarily have the track record of Wikipedia and tend to fail. Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard University, suggests that Encarta’s failure is a result of it being too limited in scope. Although it started to pull in suggestions and information from users in 2005, it did not offer the truly malleable editing capabilities of Wikipedia for students. Encarta (and other online encyclopedias like it) also cost money to use.
By contrast, Wikipedia is free, eminently accessible, and can be edited by experts regardless of where they are or whether they’ve been hired by the encyclopedia itself. It also requires a great deal of accountability from its users in that certain guidelines need to be met for publication. Some of the requirements include:
- Notability
- Verifiability
- Relevance
In each of those categories, there are innumerable other guidelines that any page creators must follow. Even so, fictitious entries like the one for Gaius Flavius Antoninus are always going to slip through the cracks. And there’s really no way to guarantee that a page or even just a small sentence will be 100% true every time.
So, is Wikipedia an applicable resource for students? It can be if you know how to use it properly. There’s a better chance that an expert with recondite knowledge of a topic will update an article on Wikipedia than they would an article on Encarta (which is now defunct anyway) or a print encyclopedia. Regardless, students will still use Wikipedia as at least a jumping off point if not the major source for any of their information.
In addition, more and more people are trusting the content that Wikipedia publishes because the platform is so well-known. That obviously leads many entities to employ the services of an expert Wikipedia writer because Wikipedia pages are now shaping public opinion on a number of levels. Students use the website for school research, but everyone else uses it for research of all varieties.