STILL IN PROGRESS.

 

You've heard it over and over from your teachers: "You can't cite Wikipedia."

 

But you use it all the time. Heck, your teachers use it.

 

So what's an intelligent person like you supposed to think? Either a) your teachers are a bunch of lazy no-good hypocrites or b) Wikipedia is an evil that is too strong to resist.

 

The answer: c) none of the above. Your teachers use Wikipedia sparingly for background research. Wikipedia is one of the greatest information-sharing experiments of all time. But you still can't cite Wikipedia. Allow me to explain why.

 

1. We don't know the author. One of the reasons we cite is to give credit to the authors of ideas that aren't ours. Anything you learn from Wikipedia could have come from many thousands of people. We don't know who they are, so we can't give them credit.

 

2. It's very easy to use Wikipedia to push your own agenda. Most of the time, Wikipedia is pretty good. But I have seen some incredibly lousy history on Wikipedia, particularly surrounding issues that are politically charged. The country of Israel was NOT founded in 1000 BCE. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is NOT "universally deemed unsuccessful." Both of these statements are things I have actually seen on Wikipedia. On the other hand, you could also get some bozo who is obsessed with guns and fills the entire article on Napoleon with a description of his weaponry -- really not the most important thing about Napoleon.

 

3. There aren't any authoritative editors. Online library resources, magazines, encyclopedias, authoritative free websites like the History Channel or PBS... all of these have an editorial staff that includes historians. Information is looked over and fact-checked by a team of experts. Lots of people look over Wikipedia, but they're mostly not historians, and they don't all bother to correct the mistakes they see.

 

So what CAN you use Wikipedia for?

 

1. Getting to know a subject so you know what else to look for. You notice something

 

2. Images. The images are from a repository called Wikimedia Commons, and they are not edited in the same way that the words