Samuel Lam, staff writer

Wikipedia: Simple, fast and wrong

By: Samuel Lam

Posted: 12/5/07

On this day 114 years ago, the electric car made its first appearance in public, blazing at the speed of 4 mph.

Today, Argentina is the eighth largest country in the world, and peanuts are also referred to as "monkey nuts" in England. I found all this through Wikipedia ? the source of all answers to any question that exists.

It's the place where curious minds go for knowledge on random subjects.

From Frank Sinatra's biography to the history of aluminum foil, this Web site has all the answers.

But in the back of my mind, I can hear my professors yelling at me.

"Don't use Wikipedia. It's not a legit source."

"Use scholarly articles, not Wikipedia."

But why? I like Wikipedia. It's simple, it's fast ? and it's convenient.

Last year, I was struggling with my preparations for my U.S. History final exam.

What happened during the Civil War? Why is Martin Luther so important? What does habeas corpus mean?

Yeah, I should have paid attention in class. I should have taken notes. But I didn't.

How was I going to cram the main points of more than 200 years of U.S. history into my brain?

The books for these classes were thick novel-sized books from old historians, instead of actual hardcover textbooks. Finding the information in these books was way too hard.

I turned to Wikipedia. It's much easier than scrapping through the big thick books.

"Don't go to Wikipedia. It's edited by regular people. It can contain a lot of inaccurate information."

Professors always say that, and they are right.

In 2005, John Seigenthaler Sr., a well-known writer and journalist, found his biography on Wikipedia edited with false information.

The Seigenthaler profile linked the author to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. This hoax went undetected for nearly four months.

I actually didn't know too much about this controversy, but I found out more through Wikipedia.

Editors have now been put in place to check the accuracy of information submitted to the site. That's good, since now my profile page no longer says that I'm a viking with a jigsaw puzzle, according to Wikipedia.

Heck, I have even edited information on Wikipedia before. I was bored one day and I just decided to add some additional information to one of my favorite musicians on the site, Jem.

Do you trust the information a regular guy like me can submit?

It's hard to trust just anybody's word on a site like Wikipedia. But we hold onto that thought that submitted information is accurate, that the submitters wouldn't want to lie to a community they love so much.

But we can't rely on Wikipedia so much.

During this time of finals, it's tempting to finish research papers with the help of Wikipedia. I've been tempted to just go to the site, look for information and just base my paper off it rather than confirming it with a legit source. That's not right.

Luckily, Wikipedia pages provide links to other Web pages, books and scholarly articles. Use those instead.

There's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia to look up information. It's not wrong to use the site to get an idea of a subject you're studying. It's a tool, and we should use it to our advantage.

But be smart about when you choose to use it.

You don't want to accidentally profile somebody as a viking.