As university students, surely everyone has used Wikipedia at some point in time – whether to find out the meaning of a term or concept, the history of an event or famous face; or to gain a basic understanding of a particular topic before conducting further specified research, possibly beginning by exploring the reference list.
Bruns (2008) describes Wikipedia as a “collaboratively created and edited online encyclopedia”. I remember when I was in the younger years in high school, I would go to the library and pull out the Encyclopaedia Britannica to get me started on a topic. Years later and Wikipedia often serves as my first port of call for constructing my knowledge base on a topic. Is this a bad thing? Does this make me any less of a student? I don’t think so.
Wikipedia is an online resource that embodies the meaning of produsage (see my previous post on produsage) – that is, “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement” (Bruns 2007). Wikipedia is a collaborative online community, enabling “all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge” (Bruns 2007); therefore fostering collective intelligence.
As university students, we are told time and time again not to reference Wikipedia as it is not a credible source of information. And more often than not, this is true. But this does not mean that we can’t use Wikipedia in the simplest form – as a basis for knowledge and understanding and to encourage further research. Wikipedia has implemented policies and guidelines for content standards, demonstraing that it is not unjustified as basic source for infromation. The most signficant of content standards are the three principal core policies – neutral point of view, verifiablity and no original research. Neutral point of view refers to a fair representation of views without bias; verifiability means that content must be attributed to a reliable published source; no original research restricts new unpublished thoughts (see here for more details).
I have vistied Wikipedia intending to briefly peruse a topic, and an hour later have found myself absorbed, clicking through the links to other topics, lost in the wealth of interesting information on Wikipedia. Instead of criticising Wikipedia for it’s lack of credibilty amongst other things, rather, as future academics we should be assessing the positive aspects of the source – such as encouraging the discovery of new information – and how it has a valid place on the World Wide Web. Wikipedia is a pool of information. If we use it in this manner, then it serves a valid purpose.
