My Thoughts: Wikipedia

Anyone who knows me knows I love Wikipedia. To me it's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but real. (And yeah, I know there's H2G2, but I like Wikipedia better.) Anywho, whenever someone new discovers I use Wikipedia, and I love it, they have one of two reactions for the most part.

1. They completely agree, and think Wikipedia is the shit.
2. They completely disagree, and think Wikipedia is bull shit.

I think Wikipedia is the shit. However I sympathize with those who disagree. The trick is with Wikipedia, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. You can't go on Wikipedia, and expect everything written on it to be stone cold fact. That is dumb. But I for one, would rather go on Wikipedia, look up a topic I know nothing about, and then be able to know something about it. Then later, if I'm talking to someone about it and I say something I learned, and they know for a fact it is wrong, they can call me on it, and I'll willingly, nay, eagerly let them correct me. Wikipedia just gives me a good head start, but it doesn't fill in all the gaps along the way.

When it comes to papers however, even some people who love Wikipedia will turn their back on their old friend. I laugh at these people. Teachers have told us since we were old enough to look up computer sources; we need to cite our work. They also told us Wikipedia was not a viable source, and we can't cite it. Naturally most people hear this and don't bother looking at Wikipedia. That's their mistake. Wikipedia articles, when it comes to scientific fact, or most facts in general, have citations and links to credible websites following the articles themselves. By going on Wikipedia and looking up their topic, students can gain an overall understanding of their topic, and then can venture into other websites knowing what they need to look for. I know when I had an extra credit paper due last semester on Osteoporosis I needed to have 3 citations from PubMed, a scientific article database. First thing I did was go look up Osteoporosis on Wikipedia. While reading the article, I opened the citations in new tabs (Firefox of course,) and after I was done reading I looked at what the citations linked to. Interestingly enough, they linked to PubMed articles! I then looked through those articles, found the information I needed, and finished the paper in no time. It was that simple. And it's not cheating. If anyone would like to argue that using facts from a certainly credible scientific article is not valid due to being linked there from another website, please, do so. Just because it was linked from Wikipedia doesn't make it any less credible.

So please, next time your friend is yelling at you and saying you can never take anything you read on Wikipedia as fact, and nod and pat them on the back, but tell them that they're still wrong, because the scientific article they took the information from had more credentials than their dad.