Wikipedia can absolutely not be used as a scholarly source. Here are the reasons why is shouldn’t be used as a scholarly source. Anybody can go on an article and write whatever they want weather it is accurate or not. A scholarly source needs to be perfect there cannot be any false information in the article and with Wikipedia there could be false information because anybody can write whatever they want. In our group findings we did find that most of the information was accurate and the factually stated information was 99% on the dime but that 1% that isn’t there is what makes it not a scholarly article for me. I found a lot of strengths for Wikipedia. The first one I found is that it is a great starting point to get a broad overview of a topic that you are studying. If you have a topic that you have no idea about hen Wikipedia is defiantly the place to start, with saying that you can’t rely on the full validity of it but it can help fill in a lot of blanks for you. Whatever you gather reading a Wikipedia article needs to be verified in other sources. The weakness is quite obvious; it is not 100% accurate of a source. This is a huge weakness but you can use Wikipedia for starting points and getting educated on a topic in a short amount of time.
These strengths and weaknesses tell me a ton about American culture. Although Wikipedia is not a scholarly source it is used like one all the time in colleges and high schools. I actually catch friend’s writing papers off stuff they pull from Wikipedia all the time which scares me. To me Wikipedia is just sending out culture down a path of laziness and carelessness. In our society already we are far to spoiled with all of our gadgets that we carry around and how easy it is to access information no matter where you are. On a side note I felt it is necessary to mention that I was hiking last weekend with one of my best friends who has the new i-phone and we took a break and he decided to Skype with his girlfriend on his built in web cam. I felt like he ruined the hiking trip because I wanted to get away from this kind of stuff and I feel like this technology is completely invading my privacy. This is just an example of how easy it is to access others and information and now with Wikipedia you can literally type in just about anything and there is a Wikipedia article on it. Even scarier to me is that when these students receive their papers back they are receiving good grades on the papers that they designed around Wikipedia. Our future is a future of laziness in my opinion and I don’t think many can throw a valid argument back and say our future is not headed for a lazy and careless culture. Some might even argue that we are already a lazy and careless culture!
I learned a lot from this midterm assignment. I can see now how biased sources can be not just Wikipedia. I learned how important it is that while doing research on a topic that Wikipedia can serve as a great starting point but it is very important to use scholarly articles while conducting research because it could lead to problems such as false information if you do not seek scholarly articles. The last thing that I can take away from this project is that it is so important not to fall into the trap of laziness that our culture is so destined for. Instead of just resorting to easy findings such as Wikipedia it pays off much more just to find scholarly articles and do the job right.
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