In reading the authors' description of wikipedia I was reminded of my concern that the information on wikipedia is only as reliable as the latest posting. I was thinking of the scenario of me posting photos of birds and identifying something incorrectly, and having someone use that information thinking it was true. It seems that there is a community that monitors most areas. The book on page 73 describes this problem satisfactorily. However, it is up to the user to realize that any entry in wikipedia is not guaranteed to be correct.
3 comments:
I completely agree! The possible lack of accuracy does worry me, but Shahmeer said that there is a way to control for the posting of inaccurate information on Wikipedia. This may be described in the text. I will let you know when I find out how it works.
I agree as well, but Wikipedia does provide a good place to start. Any research should be followed-up by at least a couple of sources, so I use it more as a starting point for where to continue my search. It provides a great deal of background, and I can use that to dig deeper into a subject. For example, I recently did some research on Ghandi, and I used Wikipedia to get the names (and spellings) of the people that were closest to him. I then did internet and library research on the names of those people. I didn't use the information provide about him or his associates, but I did get some basic valuable background to research further.
I can see how using wikipedia would 'get the ball rolling' so to speak on a topic and the further research for substance could follow. Maybe I will try that when I am stumped or need a place to start.
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