Trippy Wiki Tips

Yesterday morning I learned some incredibly helpful online research tips from Jeff Utecht. You know, the type of life hack that you hear about once in a blue moon and wish somebody had thought to teach you YEARS before? Yeah. One of those. Fortunately, I still have a year of college left and a teaching career in front of me in which I will actually get to use some of those tips. And I suppose if you are reading this, I should pay it forward and give you at least one tip while I'm at it.

So, the tip I want to share from you is about researching on Wikipedia. You may wonder, How can a person tell (say, a student) whether a Wikipedia article is reliable and accurate? Thanks for asking; let me tell you! Let's visit a page just for fun: Barry Tuckwell's biographical page. (You've probably never heard of him, so everything you learn will be new - but will it be good info??) We can read all about what people have posted about Tuckwell, see that he's an Australian musician, etc. etc. But how do we know whether we're getting the full picture? Well, you will see a little tab at the top-left hand of the screen that says "talk." Click it.

Now you should see a page that looks something like this: 

Find it? Good. You can scroll down to see some discussions that are happening, but for now we are interested in this top section. So now, in the yellow boxes, you will see the projects that this Tuckwell article is about, as well as a rating called "Start-class." Wonder what "Start-class" means for a music article? Click the little [show] link on the right side. Somewhere towards the bottom of the now-expanded box is this sentence: "This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale." What quality scale, you might ask? Click on "quality scale," and you will see a complete handy-dandy rubric about how to tell what kind of quality Start-Class refers to. (You can also see the criteria for other gradations of quality - take a quick look at those too.)

As it turns out, this article "is developing, but which is quite incomplete. It might or might not cite adequate reliable sources." So the article is just okay, and while it might give you a super basic idea of who this Barry Tuckwell guy is, if you want to dig deeper you will have to go somewhere else.

Maybe you already knew all this stuff, but maybe some of this was new. Either way, I hope this was helpful for you, whether you are just a person who enjoys looking things up on Wikipedia, or whether you are a parent or teacher who wants to show your kids a quick and simple way to get an idea of how good a Wiki article is. Turns out, it can be a reliable source! But you have to know how to check it. It may be, as with Barry Tuckwell's article, that you are missing parts of the picture.