Wikipedia Research Paper

Weak e-pedia

Despite the online encyclopedia Wikipedia 's global popularity and massive amount of data covering vast ranges of topics across multiple languages, the validity of the content is questionable. It is a wise decision for universities and other educational institutions to prohibit students from using Wikipedia for reference material. The well known online knowledge bank has close to 4.5 million articles in English alone. With such massive content, it 's probably safe to assume that every person with Internet access has come across one of these articles at some point in their browsing history. The webpage name Wikipedia is very similar to the word encyclopedia and may imply to users that the website is an online version
“Administrators on Wikipedia have the power to delete or disallow comments or articles they disagree with and support the viewpoints they approve. For example, beginning in 2003, U.K. scientist William Connolly became a Web site administrator and subsequently wrote or rewrote more than 5,000 Wikipedia articles supporting the concept of climate change and global warming. More importantly, he used his authority to ban more than 2,000 contributors with opposing viewpoints from making further contributions. Furthermore, in 2007, a new program called WikiScanner uncovered individuals with a clear conflict of interest that had written or edited some Wikipedia entries. Employees from the CIA, the Demographic National Party and Diebold were editing Wikipedia entries in their employer 's favor.” This allows users to slant material contained within Wikipedia 's articles in favor of their own beliefs. Therefore, Wikipedia 's vault of information cannot be leaned on to encompass the whole, unbiased knowledge of any topic. A full understanding of all aspects of a topic is essential when researching and studying, whether for academic purposes or not. Relying solely on a resource that undeniably has inaccuracies is without a doubt ill-advised and unquestionably a solid reason for universities to forbid
It 's part of the research. As with any research, students should seek multiple resources to confirm reliability. On the other hand, students should be educated and guided to look beyond a single source, unreliable or not, when researching. Educational institutions have the ability to instill these habits in students by forcing them to look beyond web resources that generate heavy web traffic for one stop information shopping. Despite Wikipedia 's proven inaccuracies, Alexa.com shows that the online encyclopedia currently holds 6th place for top websites globally and 7th place in the U.S. Regardless of the website popularity, web users should not associate that popularity with validity. It 's advisable to remain skeptical when seeking information from Wikipedia and any other online