Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/James Madison University/Critical Reading and Writing (Fall 2017)

Have your high school teachers ever told you that Wikipedia should never be used? Although, they are correct to an extent, there is credible information on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a good way to get a quick, neutral based information online. For an article to have a neutral point of view, it must contain multiple unbiased viewpoints. Also, original research is not published to Wikipedia which makes Wikipedia more reliable.

Some Wikipedia articles are more reliable than other articles. A “featured” Wikipedia article is considered to be the best type of articles on Wikipedia. These articles tend to have 40-150 sources. For a source to be credible, they must have reliable authors and institutions. This means that the author is often times experts in the field or the source has a highly respected institution such as Oxford University Press or Princeton University Press. The featured articles tend to have 8,000 to 10,000 words in them.

The next type of Wikipedia article is “good” article. These articles meet a set of standards, but are not as credible as the “featured” article.There are usually fewer sources for a “good” article which makes them less reliable. Also, the source might be outdated or not have a credible author. The Lord Howe Island article has sources that are from 1983, information could have definitely changed over 34 years. One of resources also claims that Daphne Nicols wrote about Lord Howe Island Rising. Although, when you google her name there seems to be zero information about her. This makes the sources less reliable.There also seems to be a significant decrease of sources and words compared to the “featured” articles.The Lord Howe “good” article, had 22 sources and 1,810 words within the article.

On a “good” article, the talk page seems to discuss more problematic ideas. The Lord Howe’s talk page questioned if the island is really the most southern reef and the timezone of the island. These ideas discuss bigger problems than the “featured” Wikipedia articles. For example, the Bacteria Wikipedia page might argue about how many species there actually are. This is a complicated problem to solve because they are thousands of different species, so it is hard to count them all. Although, writers should be able to research the most southern island and time zones easier than how many bacterial species there are in the world.

The “featured” articles seems to have a stronger bibliography compared to the “good” articles. The featured articles usually always have an author, date, title, institution, and page number while the good articles only have some of the following. It is also extremely important to have a variety of different sources. Having credible sources such as a scholarly journal, books, and credible websites can help make an article reliable.

Although some Wikipedia articles are more credible than others, this does not make Wikipedia unreliable.Readers should look at the content and sources of the article, instead of automatically thinking that Wikipedia is untrustworthy. Despite all the rumors, Wikipedia it is still a good way to get brief information on a topic.