Summary:
Contrary to popular belief, Wikipedia can be used effectively during the research process.
Generally speaking, don’t cite and reference Wikipedia—you can, however, often use it as one among many possible jumping off point for finding some high-quality sources.
Reflect on your research process. How well does Wikipedia fit as a tool (compared to alternative resources)? Use it only insofar as it’s helping you achieve your research goals.
I often spend a good bit of time with students considering strategies they can use to find sources for their research papers. When I note the option of using Wikipedia to get the ball rolling, the shared sneers and uncomfortable glances in the room become hard to ignore. A more vocal student will sometimes then inform me of the common understanding among the group: they’ve been told by former instructors that Wikipedia is trash and should be avoided.
I think this is an unfortunate view of Wikipedia that largely cuts students off from a useful and easily accessible resource that can indeed be harnessed during research process.
Like any source, Wikipedia isn’t perfect. However, Wikipedia can be used effectively.
What, then, is Wikipedia good for? Simply put, it can be a great (yes, I said great) place to start—particularly for students who might feel untethered or lost at sea in the early stages of the research process. Let’s take the example of a very broad research topic for an abnormal psychology course. Imagine you’re asked to write a paper on the usefulness of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for treating borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Where to start? A standard abnormal psychology textbook may have mentioned the use of DBT for BPD, but probably not developed the therapy’s nature or the nuances of its usefulness much further. Many students, finding the text lacking, will jump right to searching Google Scholar or their institution’s library page. This isn’t entirely a bad idea, but it might be inefficient and more stressful than necessary. The problem is that the search is going to give you a broad pool of academic sources—some that will be far beyond your understanding, some that aren’t very good, and some that may be irrelevant—with no story or thread tying it all together. This strategy can be extremely overwhelming as it can be hard to know which sources to start with and which ones to set aside.
So, it could be a mistake to start with Google Scholar or library search. The mistake lies in forgetting that research is a dynamic process; while these search engines are, perhaps, where you want to go eventually, it’s good to start by tethering yourself to a foundational structure of potential core sources. Wikipedia can sometimes serve as that foundation.
Why not start, then, by opening the Wikipedia entry for DBT and reading through it? While this, perhaps, sounds or feels amateurish and wrongheaded, try to set that gut feeling aside. Doing so, however, requires that you take a more of a complex and dynamic view of the research process.
First, you should never be 100% confident in what you read on Wikipedia (that goes for any source—even the fanciest, most scholarly looking research articles). When your goal is important, as in the case of writing a paper, you should never stop at and be satisfied with what Wikipedia tells you. In other words, never use it as your primary source or the final word in constructing your understanding or what you’re going to communicate to the audience.
As a rule, then, don’t cite and reference Wikipedia as a source in your project. I think that sort of rule is what teachers ought to be telling their students. Not “don’t use Wikipedia” but, instead, “don’t depend on it—don’t cite it”.
Valuable Wikipedia articles get right to the point of summarizing the key stuff while—and this is critical—connecting that core information with primary sources, which are often scientific and other academic papers. These sources are connected to the text with little blue numbers in superscript that link to the references found at the bottom of the page. For a student with little foundational knowledge—this can be extremely useful as you won’t have to blindly wade through a sea of possibly useful (but often not!) sources. Those invisible people behind Wikipedia have done some of the work for you.
Now, those linked sources might be excellent, but they also might be terrible. That’s where your scientific and information literacy comes into play. Regardless of whether you’re using Wikipedia as a jumping off point or searching articles at your school library, you still need foundational understanding to help you determine whether what you’re finding is any good (e.g., Is it a scientific research article? Is it a good one?). The source material section of the MAPS handbook for critical thinking can help lay some of the groundwork for that.
Wrapping things up, yes, citing and referencing Wikipedia as your source might suggest to the reader that you’re being lazy or are naïve about the research process. Don’t do it; you shouldn’t rely solely on the information you find there. Take those necessary next steps—open provided links, collect key primary sources, assess their quality (Who wrote it? Who funded it? Where’s it published?], read the best and most applicable works, etc.
While you shouldn’t use it as your primary source, Wikipedia is certainly not trash (as some might have us believe)—it can serve as an organized compendium of key sources you can easily click on and read further. Go ahead and use it as a place to start forming a rough framework for your topic(s) and a jumping off point for the collection of sources you might ultimately use as your primary sources.
At the same time, we do often use those obvious starting places like Google search and Wikipedia lazily—they’re what most easily come to mind rather than the venues we’ve thoughtfully selected. While that’s better than stewing over where to begin, don’t forget that there might be more reliable alternatives than Wikipedia. Try, for example, britannica.com, where instead of being crowdsourced, the entries are often written by experts (the authors are noted and more information about them is linked). Find and bookmark an alternative and, with some trial and error, see if Wikipedia or the other serves as better starting place.
Comments