citing wikipedia

Ran into this interesting post from one Jim Rusconi, a teacher at Coyle-Cassidy High School in Massachusetts regarding students citing Wikipedia as a source of information on term papers.

He raised some very good points on the issue:

“Who is the author of a Wikipedia article and what is the copyright date? It appears to me that by its very nature Wikipedia cannot be cited in the traditional way.”

After some consideration on the issue i wrote the following:

To cite wikipedia itself:

“Wikipedia articles should cite their sources, preferably reliable sources.”

This quote comes from the intro of the article Cite Sources on Wikipedia from Beland and was written 2.jun 02:28. At the same time the article was merged with another one called “Confirm queried sources” after some discussion on the issue.

So the first rule of citations of wikipedia would be… try not to cite wikipedia and go to the originally cited material… (assuming that it isnt completly original)

The second rule should be, if you really have to cite wikipedia, really dig into the article history, and get who and when and try to get a feel for group discussions on the issue at the time if there were any…

As teachers i would set really high standards on wikipedia citations.

I belive wikipedia is a fantastic example of modern enterprise and having free and open knowledge bases is definitely a boon to humanity for example for ppl in the development countries which may not have the proper funding to get the same variety of knowledge (as offered on wikipedia) …

The issue of quality is a real issue, but i think that the percieved socio “importance” of the material being written about will always be in sync with the quality of the writing…

So an article on “the history of democracy” will be of a higher quality since there are many great minds and conflicting view balancing out the issue on the talk page while an article on “sampling in modern music” may not be up to academic standards…

at least wikipedia material can represent at each time what the online community interested with a single issue as well as wikipedians knew about the issue….

(wikipedia has already been cited in two court cases so there is a need to set some standards on using it)

so in closing….. cite’ing wikipedia should be avoided if possible, or else done to the maximum possible accuracy