Critics have questioned Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy for a long time. The site has also been criticized for its vulnerability to sabotage, jagged quality, and discrepancies. The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet is now being accused for providing wrong information to the students.
Neil Waters, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont said:
I was looking at a stack of final examinations and I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical from one student to another.
All the students were misguided by the same source, our so-called accurate Wikipedia. Well, the online encyclopedia, plagued by errors is troubling the educators now. The Middlebury College’s history department has banned students from using Wikipedia as a source in their papers. Anyway, they are free to seek advice from it for background material.
How accurate is Wikipedia?
Recently, Wikipedia was in news as a student from Kentucky (aged around 20) pretended to be a professor of religious studies and noticeably than 20,000 amendments to contentious topics on the online info bank.
Many people are continually improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing.
But, the continuous attacks on Wikipedia’s content accuracy have put the giant in trouble. You can imagine that the 5.3 million articles on the site are open to alteration by anyone. You might have forgotten about the false entry that stated that the comedian Sinbad was dead. On this he had said, ‘Saturday, I rose from the dead.’
What is Wikipedia doing?
Lately, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales asked the active contributors to reveal their identities and prove their credentials. They need to battle its downsides in order to carry its legacy forth.
On the other hand, a general disclaimer on Wikipedia reads:
Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields.
I am left with no answer to all the questions now. The only thing I can say is that it’s not that tough for me to rely on Wikipedia but I will never forget to verify the things now. As for students, they also need to do good research other than Wikipedia too.
