To Trust or Not to Trust - The Power of Wikipedia

Somehow I managed to get through all of my years at high school without ever having to produce a bibliography. When I tell people this they glare at me and I can feel their leer burn my face but I'm not sure why. I was of the mind that if I knew my stuff then I wouldn't have to look anything up and therefore I wouldn't have to cite anything. It's a very unprofessional way of writing essays as I am coming to realise, but then again it seemed to work pretty well for me. The thing is that I can't get away with that anymore. At university there is too much stuff sitting in books that you don't know for you to be able to get by on only the 'stuff' that you do. If I was to hand in an essay to any one of my tutors that hadn't been properly referenced then there is a good chance I would get pulled up for plagiarism and then swiftly put out on my ear by the powers that be. The thing is that it would have been far from deliberate but because I'm reading so much material now that it's sometimes hard to tell which words are mine and which aren't. As a result my essays are a minefield of footnotes, stapled firmly to a bibliography. I actually don't mind writing this type of essay. If anything I'm enjoying it more than the usual splurge of text that I would punt out for every essay in high school. However it is a time consuming business which brings me on to the topic for this post: Wikipedia. There has hardly been a piece of work that I've done since coming to university which I haven't started at Wikipedia for. We're not allowed to reference it (if one more teacher tells me this then I may flip) so why do I bother using it? I'll tell you why...

One of the greatest things (and also one of the weaknesses) of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. You don't have to be a university professor or Nobel prize winner to be able to, which means that you have access to the knowledge of almost everyone in the world. It does have a few problems though: anyone (meaning complete idiots) can touch almost every article; an article could be rife with personal opinion; and there is no way of checking who wrote it so you really can't cite it properly. As I said before, this is one of the best and worst things about Wikipedia and that's something that doesn't exactly breed confidence and trust in us.

I am of the mind that if someone really just wanted to have a laugh and edit a page then it's not going to be the page on Roman law and the Twelve Tables. They are going to say that a celebrity in fact has 3 breasts or that Arsenal have actually won a trophy in the last 6 years - but only by default. If someone is looking up law or history then they are not going to be the kind of asshole that is going to be on Wikipedia for the sole purpose of, well, being an asshole. I love the fact that if one of my lecturers was to go on Wikipedia and see a slight mistake about something then they could change it. I don't however, like the idea of one of my high school peers (who were too cool for school) going on 'for a laugh' and tweaking the article about Cicero. The thing is that I just don't see this happening - so why I am told I can't trust it?

I do trust it though. There have been countless occasions when I have been stuck on something this year and I've looked to Wikipedia for some plain English explanation. Invariably I've found the answer to my question which has, in turn, made something in a textbook or a case report clearer to me. It almost seems paradoxical that I'm not allowed to cite Wikipedia in my essays since most of the information I have has been explained to me there. What needs to be done is some sort of authentication of particular articles. For example: if I want to look at the article about the Scottish Parliament and want to know that I can trust it, there should be something that says 'Endorsed by the Scottish Parliament' or written by 'such and such', that well known constitutional academic. It would only take 20 minutes for someone to read the article that already exists and then say that is it accurate. On top of not being allowed to cite Wikipedia in my essays, we're also told not to look at it at all by some tutors which I think is mad. I don't know one person that hasn't used it and out of everyone that uses it, I know lots that do so religiously.

Knowledge is one of the greatest and most invaluable things that we have. We have sites like Wikipedia for the very reason that we live to learn. In Monday's post I said that we have to learn from our mistakes, well I'm going to put a blanket moral over this by putting it out there that we have to learn. Without knowledge (and such readily accessible knowledge from sources such as Wikipedia) we would still be hitting each other with wooden bats in some futile attempt to make a fire. My feeling is that Wikipedia is actually still a baby and that it won't be too long before we all embrace it for what it really is.

Thank you again for reading,

Martin