A team of researchers from MIT and the University of Pittsburgh asked chemistry graduate students to flex their writing skills and create new Wikipedia articles on scientific topics that were missing from the site, eCampus News reports. The new scientific Wikipedia articles received thousands of views per month, including many from researchers writing scientific literature. So, if Wikipedia is good enough for scientists, it should be good enough for students, right? This is where digital literacy best practices come in.
All you need to do with Wikipedia, then, is thank it in your heart. An encyclopedia is great for checking little details. Little details may be: General knowledge that you have forgotten, like the starting date of the First World War or the boiling point of mercury. A somewhat obscure point, like the population of Ghana. If this matters for your assignment, you should verify the information using a tried and tested source, such as the CIA World Factbook.
A very obscure point, such as the names of the founders of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party. If your professor has assigned you an article or a chapter, that means your professor thinks it is basically OK. Do you trust your professor? Efforts to spread disinformation and misinformation and enforce censorship online are increasingly sophisticated and prevalent.
Lubbock points to a drive to even out diversity in Wikipedia entries and editing, to encourage more involvement from women and non-white communities. There is also increasing commercial shenanigans, with companies and enterprising public relations people sweeping through Wikipedia to pepper pages with mentions of corporate entities and specific brands, which all provides extra work for the volunteer editors.
The general message with Wikipedia is that here, on the face of it, is what we know. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Some mischievous rewriting of history is inevitable, but editors are vigilant when it comes to party political grime artists. Already subscribed? Your opinion can help us make it better. We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration.
The user-compiled encyclopedia has helped students and sometimes horrified their teachers. So how accurate is the information?
What should users be aware of? Wikipedia, which has been referred to as a world treasure , turns 20 on Friday. According to research conducted over the years — including a scientific study published by the journal Nature in and a report commissioned by the site's Wikimedia Foundation in — Wikipedia's entries are comparable in quality to those in prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica. However, it is difficult to measure the consistency of information that can be altered at any time.
Sometimes, the quality of entries is a question of word count because longer articles will generally contain more details. Length, though, varies by language. For example, a sentence in French might contain more words than one in Kiswahili, which attaches subjects, objects and tenses to verbs. Measuring according to the file size of an entry is also of limited use because some alphabets take up more virtual space, Martin Rulsch, who works for the German section of Wikimedia and has volunteered for the site in various capacities for over 15 years, told DW.
Rulsch said quality must be gauged by individual indicators. He said a large number of contributors alone did not necessarily translate to quality content. An article that was initially "researched in detail" and factually sound would not always benefit from several changes and addenda. Moreover, it is not easy to rapidly call up the number of authors in every language version, he said.
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