Wikipedia Has Become a Science Reference Source Even Though Scientists Don't Cite it (sciencenews.org) 140
Bethany Brookshire, writing for Science News: Wikipedia is a gold mine for science fans, science bloggers and scientists alike. But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it. The site rarely ends up in a paper's citations as the source of, say, the history of the gut-brain axis or the chemical formula for polyvinyl chloride. But scientists are browsing Wikipedia just like everyone else. A recent analysis found that Wikipedia stays up-to-date on the latest research -- and vocabulary from those Wikipedia articles finds its way into scientific papers. The results don't just reveal the Wiki-habits of the ivory tower. They also show that the free, widely available information source is playing a role in research progress, especially in poorer countries.
Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:1)
They might cite your footnotes, though.
Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:5, Insightful)
While it is true that Wikipedia isn't reliable as a source the main problem is that a lot of sources that are considered reliable aren't.
Wikipedia is constantly updated. The error in the book you have in your library isn't.
It is not like Wikipedia strives for inaccuracy.
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I didn't know this until just now, but as Bryansix mentions above [slashdot.org], you can cite specific versions of a page's history to avoid this problem.
Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:4, Informative)
Except you can cite a specific wiki state which would allow someone checking sources to not only verify it but also see if the body of knowledge has changed since it was written.
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Journals are peer reviewed. Wiki pages are reviewed by peoplel interested in following the odd wiki rules. Wiki is good for a good first step and getting some info, but for a serious paper you need to find real references.
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Journals are peer reviewed. Wiki pages are reviewed by peoplel interested in following the odd wiki rules.
Are there not odd peer reviewing rules for Journals? Actual question, not trying to be sarcastic or flippant. I have no experience, I am just assuming there would be.
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They send the paper out to a randomized set of people, some of whom pass it on to their grad students, and then you send back your comments on the paper. Like code reviews but with more thinking.
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As one of those grad students once upon a time: 95% of the social scientists have absolutely no clue about the tools they use. They do things because they are traditional checkboxes, and those are the marks reviewers look for. They don't care about the logic of the tools they use, and as a result, shit gets dumped out without comprehension by either reviewers or authors.
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That's not the main problem. Wikipedia is an ecyclopedia and as such not a primary source.
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Exactly this. That scientists browse Wikipedia is not surprising to me. And when they need to cite something, they're going to go to the primary sources that are cited in the Wikipedia article.
Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a scientist and I use Wikipedia regularly to refresh myself on topics I've forgotten, or introduce myself to new topics. If I'm looking at a refresh - I'll likely notice if something is incorrect. I'm using the Wiki to trigger the memories of me sitting in class, listening to the lecture. I sometimes need a prompt to access the graphs and equations already stored in my head.
And if introducing myself to a new topic, Wikipedia serves well as a broad review and the citations allow for ease of depth.
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While it is true that Wikipedia isn't reliable as a source the main problem is that a lot of sources that are considered reliable aren't. Wikipedia is constantly updated. The error in the book you have in your library isn't.
It is not like Wikipedia strives for inaccuracy.
While this is true, sometimes the edits just relate to disinformation... both the spreading or correcting. A good example (and rare good use of twitter) is the "Congressional edits of Wikipedia" account:
https://twitter.com/congressedits [twitter.com]
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And yet, half of the reference links I try to follow with wikipedia are dead links.
Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:5, Insightful)
> People, generally, are idiots and wikipedia is a reflection of that
Sure, but lots of people aren't idiots and they're the ones writing the wiki.
The idiots are too busy complaining about the wiki on other sites.
Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:4, Interesting)
> People, generally, are idiots and wikipedia is a reflection of that
Sure, but lots of people aren't idiots and they're the ones writing the wiki.
The idiots are too busy complaining about the wiki on other sites.
This is true. In addition, most of the people who complain about wikipedia don't even know of the existence of the history and talk pages. They don't even understand the very thing they are complaining about. They also probably don't know that you can cite a specific page version so it never changes over time.
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If you're going to use something as a reference, you want the reference to be simple to use. I.e. the place you link to. Linking to the history pages is...not especially desireable.
So it's basically unusable as a reference. And it was never intended to be a reference, it's more nearly a top level index.
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Yes? And so you should refer a biologist to the history page if you want them to see the info you were referring to? This doesn't really work well. And the permanent link page may have changed. So you really can't cite it, and even if you could, you can't cite an author.
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That was certainly true a couple of years ago. But is it still true? I haven't heard any horror stories recently. Of course, it could be just that everyone gave up attempting to add things.
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That was certainly true a couple of years ago. But is it still true? I haven't heard any horror stories recently. Of course, it could be just that everyone gave up attempting to add things.
I just assume that things become "concretized" as they mature, indicating stability (or ongoing mistakes). If I need greater accuracy, it's fairly common for me to go to an article, simply hit the "end" key, and go to the links/sources. Not that I always fully understand the content of all the sources, but at least they're their, and that's something.
Re: Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score:4, Insightful)
As a research scientist, there's a tremendous wealth of information on Wikipedia, especially when breaking into a new field/area, much time can be saved when looking for an overview to figure out where the current state of affairs is on a subject from Wikipedia. You of course then need to investigate and verify the information presented but I've yet to come across examples where what I've read was amiss. Note that many in-depth science articles are written by other scientists and often edited by other scientists (a form of peer review, with less liability). Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Wikipedia gets shamed in the academic community but I certainly use it frequently.
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Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
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Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
I'm a grad student in the social sciences (education) and I use Wikipedia a lot for precisely the purposes that the AC research scientist has named and it saves me a lot of time and almost always points me in the right direction to go on to find information from more academically accepted sources. I'd say yes, in the social sciences, you do have to be more thorough and careful but I'd also say the same is true of academic journals too. The quality of research in my field in particular is very poor and there
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I have often suggested treating Wikipedia as you would an interview with an expert in the field.
It will get the broad strokes correct, and it will give you the jargon and key concepts to go research on your own, but it cannot be considered infallible or accurate of its own accord. It has pet theories and political bias. It has some gaping holes in its knowledge that aren't obvious to newcomers. It will even contradict itself, and it would be considered terribly impolite to draw attention to such problems.
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Yep, when I do academic writing I use Wikipedia heavily for big picture explanations and footnote references.
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You can't even cite it in your footnotes, because the contents aren't reliably stable. They could change completely before your work was published.
More accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is also more accurate than many people give it credit. I know there was a study done several years ago comparing Wikipedia's articles against Encyclopedia Britannica. They had experts in certain fields look at articles picked at random. There were fewer errors per page (and more overall information) in Wikipedia than there was in EB.
Sure, people deface pages all the time; but overall, despite getting a bad reputation as being inaccurate, it's more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
Re:More accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as you keep out of anything politics related.
So chemistry or astronomy majors might look at it. Sociology or *gasp* gender studies better not.
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Can you read the following Wikipedia article without falling into a frenzied rage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's more an indictment of published encyclopedias than an endorsement of Wikipedia.
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Wikipedia is also more accurate than many people give it credit.
YMMV. My friend in organic chemistry said it was better than her textbook, accurate, and mostly free of junk contributions because most people don't understand it well enough to argue about it. The math pages seem to be aimed at college graduates who are all at least conversant in abstract algebra. The electrical engineering articles are aimed at high school level of understanding -- and God help you if it has the slightest relationship to audio, because that brings out all the horribly ill-informed A/V nut
-1 Off Topic (Score:2)
The accuracy of Wikipedia isn't relevant to the question of citations. Papers should strive to cite primary sources. One might use Wikipedia to research their sources and then to the primary sources used by the secondary sources cited by Wikipedia.
But one wouldn't cite Wikipedia directly, anymore than one would cite an olde tyme printed encyclopedia. This was something I was taught not to do starting around the age of 10. Go to the general reference to get started, sure. But don't rely on the reference's su
Re:More accurate (Score:5, Informative)
You cite a particular revision of the page. For example, for PVC if you wanted an old revision: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polyvinyl_chloride&oldid=802948163 [wikipedia.org]. The history page exists for a reason.
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This is useful for pranking people. For example you can add a bunch of reference to the mother of the person you're talking to blowing goats to a Wiki article, use a link with a revision in it and you're good to go.
The only downside is that you need to burn one of your IP addresses and accounts to do it, because the Wikipedos are a humourless lot and will IP ban you.
But sometimes it's so worth it.
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Oh I don't disagree that could be a problem, but that is true of giving a citation to just about any URL though. Hopefully if you are citing a Wikipedia article, its not something that it would get deleted in the mean time.
Subject matter experts. (Score:1)
Why shouldn't they? Some of the Wikipedia articles are written by scientists.
Sounds like its working exactly as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wikipedia didn't exist when I was in school, but I was taught that you couldn't cite encyclopedias because they were what was considered common knowledge, and therefore did not require citation. Is that not the case anymore?
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We were allowed to cite newspapers though. If a newspaper said so and so said "blah blah", we didn't need to find so and so to do the citation. That'd definitely count as hearsay.
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Newspapers (and journalism in general) cover a bit of ground. If you quote a news article about a new scientific discovery, you would be better off going to the source. If you quote a news article about some major event in your city where a journalist attended the event, interviewed police officers or local politicians about a majo
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Having been present at events that were also attended by local journalists, I have to say that you can't even trust those. At the ones I was at (a small sample, admittedly) there was an extremely strong bias in favor of making the story more interesting or entertaining (or, a couple of times, shocking). The phrase "making a mountain out of a molehill" might summarize the way they presented the stories.
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Yup. It's hardly ideal, but unless you can talk to someone who was actually there it's the best you're going to get.
Citing secondary sources (Score:3)
You don't cite second-hand hearsay, highly editorialized summaries or quotations of quotations, you go to the actual research article.
Not that simple. It's ok to cite secondary sources (including opinion pieces or editorials) as long as it is made clear that that is what it is and provided that the secondary source cannot change in the future. Primary sources are preferred for obvious reasons but there are sometimes good/useful reasons to cite secondary sources. The biggest problem with citing something like Wikipedia is that there is no straightforward way to cite the specific revision of an article. Citations simply need to be able
Re:Citing secondary sources (Score:4, Informative)
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So what did the smart kid do? Crib from Wikipedia and also crib its citations instead of citing Wikipedia as a source.
I was going to make this very point (Score:2)
I was going to make this very point. As a teacher, students come in my class and practically panic when I tell them to look something up on Wikipedia. They are not hesitant to say that other teachers have told them not to use Wikipedia, "because anyone can change it."
I talk to them about the accuracy and that errors are rapidly corrected; but I am gong against years of teachers telling them to never use it. However, I have an activity that has them using Wikipedia and going to the source on the page and usi
Re:I was going to make this very point (Score:4, Insightful)
They are not hesitant to say that other teachers have told them not to use Wikipedia, "because anyone can change it."
Any good Wikipedia article has references. Those are what you use, not Wikipedia itself. Wikipedia is writing by third parties about things, not the direct information. "Anyone can change it" is two-sided. That means it can change after you cite it, but it also means that ANYONE could be the person who wrote the material, and they might not a clue.
I talk to them about the accuracy and that errors are rapidly corrected;
You know when an error is corrected after you cite the wrong information ... how? You look at it today and you know the information is right because ... it can be rapidly corrected tomorrow?
I then talk to them about suing Wikipedia
Freudian slip?
as a really good table of contents that will summarize, and take them to, the sources.
That is the true, scholarly use of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for general learning about stuff; it is NOT the right source when trying to do something in depth. I.e., you look up things you see on /. on Wikipedia. You write your chemistry paper using sources referenced by authors in Wikipedia.
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Yep, it was a slip. First, I naturally make a lot of typos. To make it worse, this is on a screen to the side of my desk because my main screen is hooked up to the classroom projector.
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To make it worse, this is on a screen to the side of my desk because my main screen is hooked up to the classroom projector.
I was kidding you about it. But maybe you shouldn't be using /. while teaching class?
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Wikipedia just serves as an intermediary. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rule number 374: don't cite wikipedia, cite its sources.
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Not that it affects your overall point, but to be pedantic, encyclopedias like Wikipedia are tertiary sources. WP policy prefers citations to secondary sources, and over-reliance on primary sources can veer into a kind of original research deemed "synthesis".
Also, as others have pointed out upthread, you can cite a specific version of a Wikipedia page to solve the change problem.
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And I f the information in Wikipedia isn’t original, it should not get cited. The problem I’ve found with Wikipedia is that some of its smartest-sounding text on technical subjects is lifted verbatim from elsewhere - sometimes referenced, sometimes not.
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Re:Wikipedia just serves as an intermediary. (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia. By definition it musn't have original content.
Precisely, which is why it shouldn't be cited. Everyone is making this about wikipedia, but the same rule has always been applied: you don't use an encyclopedia as references to cite. You use primary sources.
That doesn't mean encyclopedias aren't useful, or that they shouldn't be used. You want to use them as your first stop, so you can learn enough to know where to focus your research.
Maybe the other way around? (Score:3)
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Wikipedia is a useful tool - even to scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it.
Oh they'll admit it. They just don't cite it. There is nothing wrong with that. My wife could fairly be described as a scientist and she has several peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters to her name. She uses Wikipedia (and will freely admit as much) as a way to get her bearings on a topic she isn't deeply familiar with. Then if needed she jumps off to primary data or more authoritative sources when she needs to go deeper. She's under no illusion about the fact that Wikipedia isn't always reliable but it's certainly useful in many circumstances.
Encyclopedias have value even to subject matter experts because nobody is an expert in everything. If you need a quick primer on a topic Wikipedia can be a great place to start. No it won't and shouldn't be cited as a reference but it's a useful tool to avoid repeating the task of getting an overview on a topic.
People didn't cite encylopedias either.. (Score:2)
To the extent that they play a role, it is expected to drill down to the citations provided by the article, and chase down the citations provided by those sources, and so on until you get to the original works and internalize them for yourself.
The idea is to avoid a telephone game where material gets cited and slightly 'refined' repeatedly and get distorted.
However it is expected to use those resources to help identify relevant source material.
only place I donate (Score:2, Interesting)
I give them money every time they ask. And I'm not at all bothered if there's some skim going on at the foundation. They destroyed a friends' 20th century business model, being a recognized expert on a few historical niches, but c'est la vie.
Primary vs Secondary Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
vs Tertiary Sources (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Wikipedia considers itself to be a tertiary source [wikipedia.org], but the basic point of drilling back to the best available starting point is exactly correct.
Wikipedia has explicit instructions on this topic [wikipedia.org].
Mike O'Donnell
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Wikipedia (just like Encyclopedia Britannica back in the dead tree days) is a secondary source (i.e. it contains no original research and every fact in it should come from some other, cited, primary source). Secondary sources are not typically cited in a research paper, not because of concerns about accuracy, but because primary sources are always preferred.
Seconded.
Once you get to high school and especially the University level and beyond, then a secondary source isn't a proper source for anything other than non-academic power point slides. Unless the discussion contained within the secondary source is the actual important part that you are citing. So for instance if Wikipedia had a section that contained an interesting point you wanted to cite.
Same with books about a subject written by authors. If you are interested in what they are saying about a subjec
Handy for citations! (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in college doing my M.Sc we were told that Wikipedia was not to be referenced, and we could be marked down or failed for referencing it. The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct. (WolframAlpha, incidentally, can be referenced).
I did find myself using Wikipedia for the references, though. There are a lot of citations on every page, so if I wanted to look up something for a paper, I'd look up the citation on the wikipedia page and use it.
Traceability (Score:3)
The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct.
Even if it couldn't be changed there still would be no guarantee that the information is correct. Correctness isn't the issue for citations and citations make no assurance that the data being cited is correct. Things get cited all the time that either aren't or are later determined to be incorrect. The problem is that because it can be changed there is no way to ensure traceability of the specific version of reference. If it is printed in a magazine you can see exactly the text cited. With a web page t
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> Things get cited all the time that either aren't or are later determined to be incorrect
Yes.
> The problem is that because it can be changed
That's the *solution* to the problem you *just posted*.
The problem is that knowledge changes and articles summarizing that knowledge become out of date.
The solution is to change the summation of that knowledge to reflect the current knowledge.
Are you actually stating that we're better off with a world of outdated knowledge?!
> web page that can be changed any t
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The problem is that knowledge changes and articles summarizing that knowledge become out of date.
That's true even for primary research. Just because it is primary data doesn't mean that it is actually correct or up to date.
The solution is to change the summation of that knowledge to reflect the current knowledge.
Not with regards to citations it isn't. For citations to be valuable you have to be able to understand the exact context and data they are referencing. A citation that points to a source that can change for ANY reason is effectively useless.
Are you actually stating that we're better off with a world of outdated knowledge?!
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. I'm stating that citations need to be able to point to the exact data/text being cited at the time i
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Even before wikipedia, and way earlier than college, I remember in middle school getting drilled into our heads that you do not cite or reference a compilation like an encyclopedia directly, but use it to find material to reference.
The malleability of wikipedia is a new dimension, but even without that you do not want errors to propogate by re-interpreting a re-interpretation of a re-interpretation.
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It could be written by a Climate Scientist working for ExxonMobile.
Just because he is working for a company that has its own self interests, it doesn't necessary make the science wrong. If read, we should know that it did indeed come from an Employee of ExxonMobile so if the idea is in conflict with other sources, we can assume that the science may not have gone across a complete peer review, and its findings may had been influenced by the employer. However if it jives with the findings of other sources w
knowlege layers (Score:3)
Ever changing (Score:1)
Rather obvious: Scientists do not want to cite a source whose content can change the next day. No big surprise.
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Name one online resource where this cannot be the case. I'd already be happy if all the links I set still exist the next week.
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Name one online resource where this cannot be the case.
When I cite an article from Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) I know it will not change. There are thousands of other such sources.
I'd already be happy if all the links I set still exist the next week.
"Citation" in a scholarly work is not just a URL to a website that may or may not exist tomorrow for any number of reasons. It is a reference to an article that may be found online, or in a paper version of the journal.
7th grade lesson - You do not cite encyclopedias (Score:4, Insightful)
Way back in 7th grade when we started to learn how to do research papers. The early lesson is this.
Use Encyclopedias as a way to give yourself a starter in researching a topic that you know little about. But after you get the Gist of what the topic is about, you can follow its sources, or know enough about the topic to intelligently look for more official sources. After reading the official sources to gain the knowledge you are looking for you would cite them.
Wikipedia had a lot of good info, and for the most part it is truthful and accurate information... But it is still an encyclopedia, where topics in areas are summarized. This is good for the general knowledge questions. For the most part this is good, for general knowledge, arguing on a message board, or even while you are working on something just for a fast reference refresher. But if you are going to be doing an official research on a topic. Wikipedia may be a starting point, but not a good place to cite learned information.
Just as it should be (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're quoting Wikipedia directly, you're doing it wrong.
Every non-obvious sentence on Wikipedia requires a reliable source that supports the facts. It's OK to learn about a topic at Wikipedia, but if you're going to spread that knowledge, you must a) read the original reference supporting the facts, and b) credit the reference directly, skipping Wikipedia in the chain of attributions. Reading the original source, you can detect when one of the facts stated in the article is not really supported by the reference.
This is the proper way to disseminate knowledge stored in an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit", just in case someone edited the facts in the few seconds before you loaded the article.
Besides, if you find a discrepancy between the source and the article, you *should* correct it at the article. Everybody can edit Wikipedia, after all.
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Great starting point though (Score:3)
Organic Chemist uses Wikipedia (Score:1)
I am a PhD organic chemist with about 40 years of experience and I use Wikipedia all the time. I still work in a lab. There is now a lot of good organic chemistry information from the mundane to the esoteric. I trust it because there isn't much of a reason to put in inaccurate information on the density of triethylamine and things like that. Anytime there is a drug mentioned as a new cure for cancer, I look it up in Wikipedia as soon as I can. It's a great source. Occasionally I'll find an error and I'll no
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... there isn't much of a reason to put in inaccurate information on the density of triethylamine ...
Just watch out for drunken organic chemists. https://twitter.com/robwhisman... [twitter.com]
That's just how citations work. (Score:2)
Pretty Absurd Actually (Score:2)
Citation needed? (Score:2)
But you can site wikipedia (Score:2)
Everyone says that you can't site wikipedia because it can be defaced or randomly changed. But every change is documented with time and date of the last update with a unique link. There maybe cases where offensive material maybe permanently removed, but otherwise a snapshot of a citable page should always be available at wikipedia to view.
It is the same as citing a book, you include the edition etc as later editions can be significantly different.
Having said that, anything that is on wikipedia should be cit
I use and cite it (Score:2)
I use wikipedia and will cite it in papers.
Mostly its quite good, but as with any source you need to be careful because there are mistakes. I mostly use if for background information on well-understood topics.
No Shit (Score:2)
Ob (Score:2)
[citation needed]
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[citation needed]
[1] https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Is it possible to 'credit' an organic encyclopedia (Score:1)
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