Wikipedia: A Legitimate Source or Not?

When I first saw that my blog assignment was to answer the question of whether or not Wikipedia is legitimate, I laughed to myself. I recalled an experience with Wikipedia that I had in my journalism class during my senior year in high school.

My journalism class consisted of 25 seniors who were plagued with senioritis. The journalism class was supposed to print a newspaper but by the time March rolled around, no one really cared. We cut class to go to Starbucks and to take a dip in each other’s pools and hot tubs. When we did attend class, we were bored.

One day we decided to find out how legitimate Wikipedia really was. We decided to edit one of the entries on Wikipedia to see if anyone would notice or change it back to how it should be. We picked a very well-known American figure, President George Washington, and edited his birthday. We figured we would make his day of birth 200 years later than it really was. We figured this was a very noticeable change and would be fixed rather quickly.

Washington’s birthday stayed this way until some time in May when someone obviously changed in back.

The Wikipedia Logo

To make a long story short, I do not think Wikipedia is legitimate. Even though it now requires each edit to include sources and asks for the information to be verified, based on my experience with the website, I cannot help but not trust it.

In my experience at the University at Albany, I have found that most of my professors specifically state in their syllabi, not to use Wikipedia as a source. Their stance on Wikipedia is very similar to the stance of professors at Yale University, as seen in this article.

I think one of my sophomore year communications professors summed up what Wikipedia should be used for in a nutshell best. She said, “Wikipedia is a great starting point, but an insufficient ending point.” Basically, her advice was to use Wikipedia to find sources that will lead to more information and not to use Wikipedia as a source of information.

Even though Wikipedia has changed how it is edited and what information is posted, I still do not think its legitimate. I think the website is best used when a person scrolls down to the bottom of it and goes to the websites, books, or other sources listed in the “reference” section of the page and checks them out. Some of the sources listed are actually very helpful and can lead to additional and legitimate information about a certain topic.

Since there are so many scholarly and legitimate sources out there about hundreds of thousands of topics, I do not think we need to limit ourselves to Wikipedia.