User:MrsHamilton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My advice in a nutshell:

Remember that your teachers and librarians have chosen resources, print or electronic, paid or free, old or new, with the goal of your successful research in mind.

Evaluating every source

Many sources are fascinating, and easy to find, but not all of them are useful.

...Wikipedia is more like a library (or like the World Wide Web itself) than like a typical reference work. The mere fact that a book is in the library is no guarantee against bias or misinformation. [Emphasis mine.] The same can be said of Wikipedia articles. This does not make libraries (or Wikipedia) useless, it just means that they should be approached differently than one approaches a typical reference work.

Watch for bias...your own

"FUTON bias" = Full Text On the Net

...the failure in academic research, when researchers tend to search and read what is available online, and ignore relevant studies that are available offline in printed format only.

The nature of Wikipedia

Why Wikipedia is so great

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. Information must be checked against reliable sources: Reliable sources are credible published materials with a reliable publication process; their authors are generally regarded as trustworthy, or are authoritative in relation to the subject at hand.

WP vandalism study - Concludes that 3.0% of edits made to Wikipedia articles are vandalism, 97% of which is made by anonymous editors. 25% of the vandalism is repaired by anonymous editors, 75% by registered editors, and the median time for the reversion of vandalism is 14 minutes.