Analysis Of Diane Murley's Article In Defense Of Wikipedia

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On January 6, 2011, the internat activist Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading approximately 4.8 million journal articles from Jstor. He wanted to make the content available for everybody and for free. He commited suicide under the pressure of a potential jail sentence of 35 years. This case shows that academic knowledge is not for free; furthermore, it gives an idea how difficult it is for a freely available plattform like Wikipedia to provide good quality knowledge of academic standards. In her article In Defense of Wikipedia, Diane Murley argues that the academia has cause to revise its opinion on Wikipedia as a scholarly tool. The article is a feature of the Law Library Journal, the edition was published in 2008. The author makes …show more content…

In academic contexts they should be prepared to work with sources and to critically reflect where these sources come from. In 2011 Traphagan et al. tested the influence of being fully fully involved into the process of publication on Wikipedia on students. After being involved students showed more sensitivity towards the process of publication and the reliability of publicly assessed sources. Hence, the information literacy of students was improved. Wikipedia would support those students due to the fact that they have to get prepared for working in science which includes challenging statements of different …show more content…

Wikipedia has the potential to cause an educational shift towards a freely available, transparently organised knowledge system. Maybe this shift of knowledge was not visible in 2008, but nowadays you could argue that if academics do not go along with this trend they might soon be outdated. Eijkman states that it needs to give a new discussion about the “control of academic knowledge production” (173). If the academic institutions do carry on in denying the use of publicly accessable knowledge data bases, such as Wikipedia, they obviously fail their obligations. The hierarchic university system is changing and now academics need to focus on integrating this form of knowledge into their work. Otherwise, the traditional academic arrangements of knowledge can be outdated