MEMO #7

Opinion and Critique on whether or not Wikipedia is a Credible Source

It is hard to say that I totally believe Wikipedia, but I think that it can be considered as a useful and a quick research tool. Wikipedia can be considered as a somewhat credible resource because much information in Wikipedia is reviewed by uncountable people, so there are some chances that wrong information in Wikipedia can be corrected by someone if the information includes some mistakes or problems. In addition, much information in Wikipedia usually comes from other trusted sources, such as actually published articles, journals, and believable websites, so these kinds of information are many times quite balanced or almost accurate. Overall, I think that Wikipedia provides a valuable service to the world by providing easily accessible information.

However, although Wikipedia can be a good source to get for a basic or rough idea of some subjects in a short amount of time, we cannot trust everything in Wikipedia like other web sources because the information in Wikipedia is not a truly peer-reviewed resource, such as academic journals. We should be careful not to use Wikipedia for the academic or professional research or presentations. In other words, if somebody prepares a research paper and a presentation with good quality, it is definitely much better to use the library, e-journals, or Encyclopedia Britannica, which is commonly considered accurate, reliable, and well-written, rather than Wikipedia. In fact, many universities or university-level academic institutes, such as Stanford University, do not count Wikipedia as a reference for their student’s school works. Although I am quite inclined to use Wikipedia, I think that Wikipedia is not able to become a replacement at this point for reliable sources such as academic journals or the Encyclopedia Britannica, especially not for academic or professional works.

In conclusion, Wikipedia can be considered as a credible source for simple facts or background information because huge numbers of people work on it and Wikipedia’s credibility has been proven by some research. However, as I mentioned earlier, if we need important information, it will definitely be better to use guaranteed sources, such as academic journals. In addition, it can be a good way to prevent any credibility problem in our works if we have a habit to check against several sources for important information.