Monday, July 19, 2021

Breaking the Stigma

 For most of my educational experience, I, like most of us, was told not to use Wikipedia because it's not a "reputable source". I had only one professor in college recommend using Wikipedia as a source, but she told me only to use it for the scientific names of plants. She made it sound like Wikipedia was not reliable for any other information. Learning in class that Wikipedia can be as reliable as it is was completely mind boggling.


I was completely blown away by the ability to check how reliable a Wikipedia page is, and learning how much peer-review goes into creating a good Wikipedia page. Having worked in science and academia, I'm pretty familiar with the peer review process, and I've only ever associated it with scientific papers. Putting Wikipedia in that same category feels wrong in some ways, but I think it opens the door to so much more learning. I think that the research process when studying something or writing a paper can often be a hinderance to learning, because it feels like there are so many academic hoops to jump through just to find accurate and reputable information. Being able to use Wikipedia in academic research would completely change that and allow more time for real learning and less time spent searching for information.

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