Post 5

Stacy Schiff’s New Yorker article “Know it All” discusses the founding of Wikipedia and how it could affect our views on information on the internet. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia comprised of articles composed and edited by basically anyone on the Internet. That means anyone can update any page pretty much and maybe sometimes information in articles may not be fully correct. As a source it is extremely accessible as it is a free online encyclopedia and therefore is there for anyone with basic internet access. To compare Wikipedia to a more traditional encyclopedia, like the Encyclopedia Brittanica as the article compares it to, is quite different since the Encyclopedia Brittanica is considered a much more scholarly source. Both are great ways of finding out about topics, but in terms of researching, one is better than the other. That is not to say that Wikipedia is a bad thing however, it can be a great source to jump into research from. Wikipedia articles usually contain a bibliography at the bottom for many sources that were used to edit and update the article. Wikipedia is a wonderful starting point for many projects, especially for people in college looking for many sources for a research paper. As for the manor difference in usefulness, most college research projects and papers require credible, scholarly sources for information to seem much more credible. A source like Encyclopedia Brittanica would probably pass the scholarly source test whereas Wikipedia more than likely wouldn’t, but as stated before it shouldn’t be fully ignored when it comes to research. This is because the writers of the Wikipedia articles may or may not be experts, they probably did some sort of research into the information that was put on the pages they edited.