Wikipedia

Wikipedia is very interesting, if nothing else. I enjoyed reading this article because I feel as though so many English classes sort of just ignore Wikipedia’s existence and just say “Don’t use it for this paper, okay?”, and that’s just the end of the discussion. Nothing more. Nothing less. However, I think that there should be a dialogue about it, especially in middle and high school. I feel that this article shows that yes, Wikipedia can be accurate, but it is not suitable for research papers or any sort of documented work because it can be edited by those who have not gone through the editing and approval process of being published. I feel that many, many teachers in those lower grades do not explain this to their students.

I think the article was a very interesting read. I am an avid user of Wikipedia for my personal life, and I feel as though it does help me learn a lot of things. If I’m listening to a band, and I particularly like their song, I’ll use Wikipedia to go find their page to see what album the song comes from so that I can go listen to the entire album. As music is basically like therapy for me, I find this to be quite a help. When a band doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, I’m almost lost.

But, besides musical tastes, I’ve used Wikipedia for many other things such as hearing some sort of event on the news occurring in another part of the world, and I’m curious what it is all about, so I “wikipedia” (notice how the site has also been converted into a verb amongst modern internet users) that country to discover what is really going on. I don’t think Wikipedia is all that bad, but I feel as though it still has a lot of growing to do before teachers and professors will trust it, if they ever will.