Why profesors descent like Wikipedia :-(

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I am writing a thesis on Aleksander Fredro known Polish nineteenth century comedy writer, mine told me that I sometimes do not dare to give footnotes Wikipedia!
He told me that I can rely on Internet sources but primarily I use traditional sources, and if I will be using the Internet, is not on Wikipedia.

I wonder why it is such a great aversion professors to wikipedia.

He may think that using Wikipedia is too easy for someone your age.

A more important life lesson is that he gets to make the rules.

Wikipedia is fine for finding out the basics about some topic, like who is this Aleksandr person, when was he born, what did he write, etc, but it is not good for learning more deeply about a topic. It is good for following references to learn more about a topic though, but it is better to read more detailed sources beyond wikipedia. Wikipedia is like quick spoon feeding of basic info.

Wikipedia can be easily altered by many people at any time. An article is not going to remain the same over time. Those writing in Wikipedia don't always use proper sources or they may have a biased viewpoint, even though this is not supposed to be the case. Wikipedia is not a reliable source for these reasons.

What I like to do when writing a research paper is to look at Wikipedia for basic info, then find my own sources. Or, often Wikipedia will have some online sources listed in the references section, which I will go to in order to see if they will serve as a reliable source to use for my paper.

Encyclopedias (including online ones like wikipedia) are generally not used as academic references. Does your school not have a library? Generally, library home pages will have links to academic online resources that can be cited.

While Wikipedia itself is not a good reference, Wikipedia articles frequently have good references, many of which are peer-reviewed, journal-type articles which any professor would be delighted with.

You should consult Wikipedia as a baseline. Then obtain the articles, read them, confirm that they are pertinent to your subject, then use them in your research paper.

Doubled reply...

Last edited by QuantumChemist on 05 Mar 2016, 12:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When I was teaching, often I would have my students do special projects (posters or papers) on a particular chemistry topic that they were learning. I warned them that while they could use Wikipedia to find sources of information, it could not be considered a direct source (and I would deduct if they used it as such in their projects). The reason why has to do with the control of the quality of the information on that site. Since anyone can edit/change/add on Wikipedia, the accuracy of the information is limited, much more than a peer-reviewed journal article would be. Proven facts are the cornerstone of the hard sciences, as that is what scientists are constantly seeking to find.

Some college students (note: not all) will take the easiest route to getting what they need to get the project done, regardless if it is correct or not, which is not the lesson to be learned. That is why I tried to nip that one in the bud before it became a large thorny problem later on. Some of my former students are now in medical/pharmacy school. Would you want a medical doctor performing an operation on you if they do not care if the diagnostic information about the problem is correct or not? Or a pharmacist that does not care about the specifics of the drugs they give out? In some professions, it can literally be life or death.

I humbly believe the negatives of Wikipedia are greatly over-exaggerated.

Yes, there are stubs and low-quality articles that may get their sources from questionable places, but these articles are rare.

The vast majority of the articles are well-written, neutral and concise, and get their references from a variety of peer-reviewed articles and official documents written by professionals.

Even articles that may have issues give a brief warning at the top of their page to alert you of the fact not everything you're reading may or may not be accurate, for one reason or another.

And, forget about those who claim 'Anyone can edit it, so it must be bad!'

The vast majority of edits are carefully monitored, vandals are quickly and swiftly stopped in a matter of minutes or hours, and articles high-risk for attacks are locked or restricted only to the most trustworthy of users.

Wikipedia in itself is a good starting point.

Besides, sometimes finding sources from other places online doesn't make it reliable either.

Not every article or piece of information you'll find will be peer-reviewed.

If you're researching history and find a page on it, for all you know it could have been written by one single 'historian' who makes up false credentials and is actually just a freshman/first-year historian major at college.

A rule of the internet: Nothing can be considered 100% true, but some sources are more trustworthy than others.

Even if the World Health Organization themselves officially said there's going to be a virus that causes a 'zombie apocalypse' it's possible the site was hacked, the person who wrote it is a liar and will soon be fired, or it's a total hoax that news articles are falsely circulating around the internet.

Just google 'X celebrity dead' and some article, somewhere, that doesn't look like it was written by a random person but a news site, will confirm it even if it's a lie.

Try it on anything. Google whatever opinion you want, and some biased news article or something that comes across as an offical source/reference will confirm your beliefs.

I find Wikipedia is constantly bashed by institutions. As if to say Wikipedia is just BAD BAD BAD, NO NO NO.

I don't think this. I find its credibility average. Not good, or great, but it's certainly not the most horrible source in the world. It's obviously better than getting your information from Yahoo Answers, Quora.com, About.com and such.

If you know all this, buddy, get the ef to University already!

And iron those clothes, man! (only kidding on that)

Seriously, many articles, especially those of a scientific nature, have peer-reviewed articles within their works cited/bibliography. If you go to college/university, they'll have a database where you could access these articles for free. Like others stated, Wikipedia itself is a crapshoot. It can be edited by just anyone.

However, the Wikipedia staff is always keeping tabs on it, and when criticism is warranted, they post something indicating the reason for the criticism.

I clipped off the quote, but I actually agree 100% with everything that Outrider said and further, I can't believe that he's only 17. I wish the people I went to school with where as eloquent and informed.

As I learned from the study I just did, no one oversees most studies and data can easily be altered. No one makes sure that peers even read peer reviewed journal articles, so they may never have been actually reviewed. I can attest that at least half of the people in graduate school are idiots and/or unethical. They can and do make it all the way to teaching and doing research. They get fired or quit from their institutions for their ineptness or unethicalness all the time, but the research is still out there and they will simply get another job someplace else.

I believe in open source, and in transparency in general.

Professors don't like Wikipedia because they aren't thinking about it deeply enough.

How about having students locate and document errors in Wikipedia--citing primary sources to back up the assertion of errors?

I agree with all the problems you and Outrider mentioned. I'd just like to add that a large part of Wikipedia hate generated by professors is actually about power and control. Their entire job is dispensing knowledge at a fixed rate called tuition, if that information is free and easily available that hurts their bottom line. They have a vested interest in keeping knowledge scarce and hard to obtain. It's easier to say Wikipedia is the "smut" of the academic world than to talk about the personal economics of the matter-- as is the case with most things.

If you get those articles from Wikipedia, you don't even have to mention that you even went to Wikipedia.

These articles are journal articles, peer-reviewed, etc. Those are what professors love.

You can obtain quotes from these journal articles from Wikipedia. The only thing you'd have to do is to make sure you get the proper pages for the quotes. And obtain a hard copy of the article in case the professor has any doubts.

And you should also quote elsewhere from the article. Something which is not in Wikipedia.