For this assignment, I will focus on the reliability of Wikipedia as a source in academic writing. I will discuss why people are forbidden from citing Wikipedia as a good source of information. I will also look into whether it can contain scholarly and legitimate information and elaborate on whether there is any way it can be used to assist in conducting research. Wikipedia is one of the world's most famous online encyclopedias. Wikipedia is, however, never considered as a reliable source because it does not limit the number of contributors to the website (Barnett, 2018). This simply means that anyone can edit or post information on the website; thus, it is prone to vandalism. This makes its validity remain questionable. An example of vandalism would be to edit out the correct information and write faulty information on an article. Scholarly and Legitimate Information and Research on Wikipedia. It is important to understand that Wikipedia could contain scholarly and legitimate information and research. There are well-sourced articles written according to the guidelines of Wikipedia (Jemielniak, 2019). These articles have citations listed at the end with external links; thus, the information on the site can be scholarly and legitimate research. To find out if the information is scholarly, one should look for citations and follow the external links to view the sources of information in the Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia can be a great tool to be used when conducting research. However, it should only act as a source of information for the first research or when one is collecting background information (Jemielniak, 2019). A good example of this would be when researching police use of deadly force in the US; one can first look up the issue on Wikipedia to find out the frequency, racial patterns, or policy that facilitate such events to occur.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Wikipedia is not a reliable source to use in academic research and writing. Although it may provide background information to research and may contain scholarly and legitimate information, the fact that anyone can edit it anonymously makes it likely to contain false information. If the encyclopedia creates stringent guidelines that outline and facilitate the documentation of authors who write and edit articles, the site may likely be considered to be a scholarly academic source in time.
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References
Barnett, D. (2018). Can we trust Wikipedia? 1.4 billion people can't be wrong. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/wikipedia-explained-what-is-it-trustworthy-how-work-wikimedia-2030-a8213446.html
Jemielniak D. (2019). Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics? GigaScience, 8(12), giz139. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giz139
