One of the most frequent questions we get when we talk about new media and credibility is about Wikipedia. How are students and teachers supposed to assess the information they find on Wikipedia? Can we give any guidelines?
Credibility is an issue that is talked about extensively within the Wikipedia community, and as a result, there are a variety of Wikipedia articles about Wikipedia’s community standards for Credibility. In this post, I’ll be sharing links to some of these pages that might be useful for anyone who wants to learn about how a Wikipedia article is put together.
First off is a pair of articles that collect user opinions on why Wikipedia is so great, and why Wikipedia is not so great. These are a useful overview of the basic pros and cons, but if you’re looking for a less Wikipedia user-centric account, there is even a Wikipedia page that collects published criticisms from outside sources. For a more issue-based collection of criticisms, there is the similarly-named-yet-different Criticisms of Wikipedia page.
Those pages are about the general features of Wikipedia but if you are interested specifically in credibility, then you might be interested in the Reliability of Wikipedia.
If you’re interested in how Wikipedia decides what is credible, you should look at their page on verifiability. On Wikipedia, the only requirement for inclusion is that information be verifiable, and that page, along with the page on how to cite sources are good resources to learn what Wikipedia’s guidelines are.
And finally, two very useful resources for doing research on Wikipedia are an article’s talk page and edit history. You can learn about how to use both of these by looking at How to Read an Article History and a Researcher’s Guide to Discussion Pages.
Isn’t it fun being an informed Wikipedia user?
