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| How to Use Wikipedia For Your Research |
Welcome to Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" recites the banner on the front page of the location . that does not sound like something a student trying to find accurate information for his research wants to listen to , but that surely doesn't suggest Wikipedia isn't a valuable site, with many resources which will often assist you find objective information.
It's true: any user, even anonymous, can potentially edit almost every article to feature or delete information at his discretion and, whether intentionally or not, meaningfully decrease its quality. However, with just a touch little bit of attention on your side, you'll easily work around this defect -- which, after all, didn't stop Wikipedia from rapidly becoming the most important repository of human knowledge on the web -- to extract valuable and unbiased information from almost every article.
How to recognize an unbiased article from one which will not be? Even in what seems a well-written piece, you always cannot be sure that every and each single sentence in it contains correct statements. As a rule of thumb, try watching the amount of references compared to the article length. an extended article with few references is probably going to possess been written recently by only a few users, which suggests the matter hasn't quite been discussed and reviewed properly yet, while one with many references is far more likely to contain correct statements.
The other main factor to require into consideration are the so called 'meta-data' associated thereto . Wikipedia, a bit like many other wikis, offers variety of pages associated with the article itself which fairly often assist you choose whether you ought to trust its content or not.
To sum up, the most factors to require into consideration are:
1) the article length;
2) {number of references} / {article length} ratio;
3) its protection policy;
4) the date of creation;
5) the article history;
6) the amount of images , tables, etc.;
7) its quality rating.
Finally, you'll still use Wikipedia for your research albeit , all things considered, you're not too confident about the standard of the article. In cases like this, you'll still use Wikipedia as a secondary source by watching the References and External Links sections.
