Quote:
Originally Posted by TadW
Are there any studies that prove your claim?
At least where I studied, Wikipedia was not considered a trustworthy source for academic papers. Our professors made that perfectly clear to us.
Here I give you one example why. You say, as soon as someone wrongfully edits a Wikipedia entry, "a moment later, it would be corrected." That may be true for popular topics and entries. But it is most certainly not true for entries of lesser interest that receiver fewer hits by visitors.
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I remember reading a Wiki entry on Nigeria and was very surprised to see one of the colonial flags of Nigeria being displayed. For a moment I doubted my knowledge and thought, maybe I haven't been following the news closely enough to realise there was discussion over the change of Nigeria's flag! So I scouted other sources and confirmed that the entry made was vandalised. It was still up the next day. So, I think you're right that very popular entries will get more monitoring while many other less popular entries won't.
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On to a separate point,
not related to what TadW said at all:
This is not to say that Wikipedia cannot be used for research. My point all along was that Wikipedia should not be CITED in an academic paper. That's way different than saying it shouldn't be used to gain some knowledge about something as one begins the initial stages of research.
Apparently, there has been some logic fallacy in some posts above that conflate what's appropriate to use for preliminary research and what's to be cited in an scholarly paper. What this suggests to me is that whoever made that conflation (who shall be nameless) doesn't engage much, if at all, in professional and published research because that kind of conflation is not often, if at all, made by people who do published research.
Furthermore, there has been serious misunderstanding about how scholarly work gets published. We don't just hit "print" and it gets published. A journal article and book goes through numerous review processes, passes through the eyes of numerous reviewers and editors before it gets printed. This is NOT to say the source is necessary correct. After all, we academicians argue about framework, theory, interpretation, and epistemologies all the time.
Anyway, time for me to disregard some of the posts on this topic!
