WIKIPEDIA: A RELIABLE SOURCE OF INFORMATION?

Michael Vergel Chavez S13

chavz_0918@yahoo.com
Jim Manansala S13
triz817@yahoo.com
Veronica Eve Dae Serra S13
evedaeserra@yahoo.com
Jamie Ann So S13
jamie_jst14@yahoo.com

College of Computer Studies

Bachelor of Science in Information and Communications Technology Management

ABSTRACT Ms. Kiran Budhrani [1], a college professor,

This research paper focuses on the credibility of
Wikipedia with regards to students using it as a reference
material. But can the emergence of this reference website
cope up with the scandals and credibility of its contents?
How do people accept Wikipedia and what are the effects
of it to the users? Wikipedia perhaps is a good “stepping
stone” for the researchers but questionable still. The
preliminary findings suggest that Wikipedia is not a good
reference for educational references but as a quick source
of information on something, a general overview on the
subject matter so academic papers must get their sources
from real sources like published books, articles etc.
1. INTRODUCTION
Everyone in the society - students, teachers, professionals,
and even some of our parents always tend to find answers
from the questions that some might already know or brag
to share in his or her own way. The old fashioned and
traditional ways of some will still probably research it by
means of going to a national library or a campus library
and search manually all the related or the exact topics of
what he or she is looking for. A bit tiresome, but, still a
probable solution to the many – importantly, to those who
take their thesis project to the highest point of research.
But because of innovation of technology and
trends, the people tend to cope up with the situations that
engulf them today. It is because they want to live their
lives differently or as others say, convenient and easy to
handle. That’s why the internet was born and so to many
websites that provides services to the target market itself,
the society.
said:
“Humans are very social, they interact in every
possible way by means of expressions, gestures,
written and spoken words”
Humans do everything in order to be known and
to know something. In order to know something lays the
action of “doing what is acceptable and not acceptable by
everyone”. With the social behavior and the technology
today, professionals today had formulated a tool in order
to supply the needs of the society with the convenience
and usability of technology today. That need is called
“Social Computing Tools”.
Social Computing Tools are used by the present
generation in order to create social conventions with the
use of software and technology of today [1]. Social
constructors like identity and presence, helps the society
reach so many things. In terms of education itself, one
social computing tool that all of the people aware is the
power of Wikipedia and its thousands of articles that is
shared by the public.
With the rapid advancement of the technology of
Internet, its uses and functions had also increased.
Because of this, people found an alternative way in
broadening their knowledge and searching for more
information. Internet had made it possible to share
information through certain websites and one of them is
Wikipedia. Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word which
means quick or fast.
 Wikipedia is one of the best known wiki which
contains millions and millions of entries and started in
January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, hired by
Jimmy. Basically Wikipedia’s entries and articles are
submitted by different users. Wikipedia gradually relies
on the readers in order to create and verify its contents.
Moreover, it is a free online encyclopedia and being
referenced by most students for their research papers.
Currently Wikipedia has entries and articles in hundreds
of different languages and millions of contributors.
The use of Wikipedia has been beneficial in
providing quick facts to its users. One of the most popular
reason could be, Wikipedia being a free online
encyclopedia, ease of usage. Once reaching the site of
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), users can start searching
or use other Wikipedia’s sister projects such as
Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus), Wikibooks
(collection of editable online manuals and textbooks),
Wikispecies (directory of animal and plant species),
Wikisource (online source-document site) etc. [2]. Upon
searching for something over the internet on Google,
Wikipedia is usually the first result to show up thus
students use it as their reference. Eventually there are
many issues raise regarding this emerging reference
website especially its credibility.
The popularity of Wikipedia did not always have
the same positive impact on all of the people. Due to its
function that lets users to edit and create articles on their
website that are considered as reference by other users,
issues have risen that gave negative impact not just on
other people but on other countries. As to the early years
of Wikipedia, they had experienced their first scandal
with a certain known man in China and certain topics that
are not meant to be published like the Tiananmen Square
protests of 1989 and the Beijing Olympic Games and
since that China had adapted to blocking websites in their
territory. The Syrian and Tunisia Wikimedia versions are
blocked within their country. As to countries like
Uzbekistan and United Kingdom the block was only
temporary [3].
2. BEHIND THE SOCIAL COMPUTING SITE
According to educause.edu [4], Wikipedia is a free online
encyclopedia that any people can add information or edit.
Launching in the early year of 2001, it includes million of
articles in dozens of languages. Despite of the flaws and
the quality of the information given in a certain topic, it
has been one of the most popular online resources.
Statistics put it today as the eight most visited Web site in
the whole state of America, not for long, in the whole
world. It also contains many numbers of external links in
which it is connected to the main topic instead. The
external links are also the most probable sites that a
person can go to whether information is either incomplete
or not yet clear to the Wikipedia discussions. The site also
organizes the information by means of certain chapters
and glossaries in which the reader can understand it
clearly, piece by piece.
Wikipedia has become one of the tools that many
college students used to work on. At the same time, some
faculty and researchers doesn’t accept it yet, but, due to
more collaborations and revision of information, in the
mere future, it can be a reliable source of research for
everyone to see. Statistics shows that as of today, 85% of
the information in Wikipedia are yet fixed and true to the
point of explanation. Developers are making it up to the
perfect digit in order to be one of the most trusted sites to
offer quality reference and consistent information.
As an online search function, Wikipedia’s
searches are done through keyword searches, locate and
read articles, access some copyright photos and other
media, and lastly, follow hyperlinks to some resources
related to the topics at hand. To avoid the danger of
reliability and out-of-date of information, Wikipedia
added a function that alerting the users that the specific
content that might be less trustworthy to the public.
3. GOOD THING ON WIKIPEDIA
According to an article written by Dayle Turner in
associatedcontent.com, Wikipedia today can be used as
the source of writing assignments or materials for within
classes [5]. The fact that, students can write new articles
or edit existing articles on Wikipedia as part can be a
writing assignment that gives the students the opportunity
to learn more about topics like language arts, history,
economics, political science, biology, math, at any level-
elementary middle school, high school or college.
Wikipedia can be used as a tool for learning more while
outside of the class as concluded by the article on the
website.
Wikipedia’s major feature of open source writing
outcomes about the concerns about the accuracy, quality,
validity, objectivity, and usefulness of the contents in
Wikipedia that made some intuitions ban the students to
use this website. Turner said that these institutions does
not realize the very nature of Wikipedia which is to make
real-world writing excellent point for students a students
about issues of accuracy quality, validity, objectivity, and
usefulness. This can offer students’ opportunities to
"write for real" and to engage in critical thinking which
the primary goals of education are [5].
This was strongly agreed by the creator of
Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. As Wales quoted on article
news in BBC “We are the Red Cross of Information”. He
said that educators that do not allow their students to
access Wikipedia are “bad educators”. As he had
explained in Online Information conference at London's
Olympia, students should be allowed with the access of
this site as an online encyclopedia. He said that Wikipedia
is the stepping stone of the students to other sources.
"You can ban kids from listening to rock 'n' roll music,
but they're going to anyway," he added. This mentality
goes with information to, so why not let them? And that is
why the creator had created new editing and checking
procedures that made Wikipedia a trustworthy site. One
of the procedures used is real-time critic review. The fact
that technology has advanced, still the creator of
Wikipedia prefers the use of peer critique (volunteers
check new and updated articles for accuracy and
impartiality). This theme is taken from the Creative
Commons scheme which would "bring Wikipedia into
line with the rest of the free content culture". As
compared to Encyclopedia Britannica with its 239 years
of history and rigorous fact-checking procedures,
Wikipedia is still prone to article vandalism [6].
But still Britannica and Wikipedia should not be
seen as direct competitors. Both have different way of
delivering information to the learners and Wikipedia, had
made the use of encyclopedias "trendy and popular" with
young people, which could only benefit Britannica's
subscription-led service [6].
"Wiki wants to give people the maximum
freedom to do good.” the last thing Jimmy Wales said to
the conference; this shows the clear goal of the website to
reach out and give the learners, students the freedom to
explore and share more and more information [6].
Meanwhile, different views rise with the use of
Wikipedia. On the blog post of Nicholas Carr, he wrote,
“Wikipedia articles have become the default external link
for many creators of web content, not because Wikipedia
is the best source but because it’s the best-known source
and, generally, its “good enough.” Wikipedia is the lazy
man’s link, and we’re all lazy men, except for those of us
who are lazy women” [7]. This is also true with the
mentality of a student trying to cram for a research not
just because of the summarized contents of Wikipedia but
also the way internet or web browsers behave when
searching for information. Most of the results in the
internet points to Wikipedia, this deprives the student on
having an in- depth search of the information, research or
topic.
4. CREDIBILITY ISSUE
Wikipedia is a good source of information especially for
students who are searching for the general overview of
the topic. However, it is not a recommended for college
students for their research and class projects, example of
which writing a paper about a battle, students should refer
to history books not Wikipedia it only suggests quick
facts, from the creator of Wikipedia himself, Jimmy
Wales [8]. Also to quote from Chronicle of Higher
Education:
Speaking at a conference at the University of
Pennsylvania on June 9, 2006 called “The
Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he
gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from
students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten
them into academic hot water. “They say,
‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because
I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned
out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no
sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to
himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t
cite the encyclopedia.”
As written earlier, Wikipedia is the “stepping
stone” when researching for links on the internet, but the
bad thing about this is that, when the student sees the
information written on Wikipedia, he or she stops
searching for more and just be contented on the contents
that Wikipedia has. The outcome of this is that the use or
visits of specialty sites will be less. Just like the author of
the blog post “Wikipedia-Side Effects”, he starts using
websites MathWorld which consists of the large
contributor pool with little editorial control, to reference
his studies. As the speed of technology increases, more
and more websites had come out and one of this was a
better math reference site which is PlanetMath. For years
he had used these sites to help his studies until a better
site with a better web structure rises which is Wikipedia.
Comparing Wikipedia to two Math specialist sites,
PlanetMath and MathWorld, the popularity of Wikipedia
grows faster that it overlaps the use of such sites. Now
Wikipedia is more visited by the author because
Wikipedia summarizes the contents of the two sites but
without the better explanations of course and the topics
were copied referencing the two sites only as a link. Even
though the two specialty sites are free to be copied, the
chance of the student and the author to visit this site is
lesser [9].
As to Wikipedia being widely used as a
reference to research by the students, many educators
were alerted whether Wikipedia is a credible source or
not. According to Dave Taylor, recognized as an expert
both on technical and business issues wrote an article
regarding what Wikipedia is lacking. In his article “What
Wikipedia Lost: Credibility” sums up the credibility issue
of Wikipedia. As he was editing a paper of his student, he
said “It really hit me as I was editing the student papers
and reading passages like this:

"Twenty-five years ago, all computer usage,
including the use of Microsoft applications, was
accomplished from manual entries at the
command line prompt. In addition to the
mainframe operating systems there was Digital
Research's CP/M-80 for the 8080 / 8085 / Z-80
CPUs and MS-DOS (or PC-DOS when supplied
by IBM) which was based originally on CP/M-
80, among others [Wikipedia, 2005]. The
ubiquitous commercial off-the-shelf software of
today was not to become available for another
fifteen to twenty years..."
It seems like once a Web site gains a certain size
or level of visibility in the public eye it automatically
gains credibility and veracity. "It's published on the Web,
it must be true."” And to prove that the author
(Wikipedia) was wrong, he continues, “Oh, and the cited
page in the paper? It's clearly wrong or at least needs
some specific calendar references because if you do the
math you'll see that the author is suggesting that
commercial applications didn't show up for the PC or Mac
until about 5-10 years ago, which is complete nonsense.
Worse, the four students collaborating on the paper never
thought to question the information source - after all, it
was Wikipedia! - and never caught the mistake.” Also as
a writer, he has submitted an entry to Wikipedia about
himself and checking back few months after, there were
six entries of Dave Taylor [10].
Since anyone can edit information on Wikipedia,
some people try to vandalize the pages with criticisms
though Wikipedians would change them back. Even drug
addicts could manipulate what a Harvard graduate have
written on the page. Continues editing of information
seems to be endless until the information is accepted by
both sides as neutral will have the chance of surviving in
the future [11].
5. CONCLUSION
Wikipedia is a great idea but is a challenge to education.
Now that education has moved its way on the twenty first
century, information is available online to students
including those is Wikipedia. It is hard for the
u0niversities and colleges to push students to go back to
the previous way of finding resources on information and
expect them not to use available resources over the
internet to help them gain more knowledge.
As an implication for teaching and learning for
the future generations ahead, Wikipedia is developing to
cross the line between the consumption and creation of
more knowledge, opening the way to many motivated
students and users to see themselves as a member of
community of learners and researchers alike. The social
computing tool offers all individuals to pave way to their
researching skills and make evaluations so that they can
also participate to save their knowledge in this repository
for future generation ahead. They will also see how
knowledge is created and refine one step at the time, also
to understand when a specific topic is sufficient to make a
valuable contribution. Wikipedia can encourage students
and researchers to critically analyze more on what they
read, ask questions, engage in reflective learning, and to
be creative and logic in education at the same time.
Wikipedia allows user to explore the information
by clicking simultaneously from one hypertext of
information to another allows user to easily jumping from
one information to another. But the problem in this
information is that there is no real time support for the
response and time lag for error correction when
information is presented wrongly. That is why some of
the articles are still risky to use because the time response
is to a maximum of one week that gives the user a time to
intake wrong information. Presentation of the information
can only be improved if the community works towards it,
the honesty within the usage, the right information and
sources are to be used and less information vandalism.
For short Wikipedia changes quickly and improves more
and reduces error because of its users’ contribution. And
as of today the society have accepted Wikipedia as one of
the resources for teaching. And because of this, the
dependency of referencing in Wikipedia grows not only
by the usage of the students or learning institution but also
by other people.
However, as for educational institutions like
universities and colleges, Wikipedia is not regarded as
reliable source of information. Similar to the internet,
Wikipedia has good information and erroneous
information. Therefore, it is up to the educators to help
their students recognize information found in Wikipedia
either good and correct or biased and wrong.
6. RECOMMENDATION
As a recommendation, having the full knowledge of the
social computing tool is the first key to know how it
works and how it would play a role in the part of your
assignment or research paper. Equipped with these will
enable the users to browse information without the hassle
of just copying and pasting different articles in a
document and instead give more information that can be
refer in the research work by means of the external links
of the specific article itself.
Wikipedia promotes collaboration of different
information around the world; it is up to the individuals
how they will use it clearly and with caution. It is a social
computing tool that may be a universal encyclopedia in
the mere future generations of youth.
With all the advancements in Wikipedia, the
question still remains, is Wikipedia enough to feed the
curiosity of students, learners? It is true that with the error
preventers of Wikipedia, it is has a lesser risk when used
and still provides the curious the information, but what
about the in depth understanding. The possibility of
learning more not just with only use of Wikipedia is still
high, using and visiting on specialty sites is still better to
feed not just the passing curiosity but also the need to
learn more with exploration and research.
7. REFERENCES
[1] L. Bouck, Wikipedia, http://www.CNET.com,
October 19, 2008.
[2] K. Budhrani, “Social Computing Tools and Social
Technography”,
http://www.slideshare.net/kiranb/socialcomputingtoolsand
technography-presentation, 2008
[3] Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia, 2009.
[4] 7 Things you know about Wikipedia.,
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7026.pdf, 2007
[5] D. Turner, Using Wikipedia for Writing Assignments,
http://www.associatedcontent.com, July 2008.
[6] A. Coleman, Students should use Wikipedia,
http://news.bbc.co.uk, December 2007.
[7] N. Carr, The centripetal Web,
http://www.roughtype.com, October 2008.
[8] J. Young, Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic
Use of His Creation,
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1328/wikipedia-
founder-discourages-academic-use-of-his-creation, June
12, 2006.
[9] Wikipedia-Side effects,
http://www.whatisresearch.wordpress.com, November
2008.
[10] D. Taylor, What Wikipedia Lost: Credibility,
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/what_wikipedia_lost_credi
bility.html, December 27, 2005
[11] J. Sidener, Everybody’s Encyclopedia,
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041206/new
s_mz1b6encyclo.html, December 6, 2004.