Despite the controversy surrounding it, Wikipedia has become one of the largest storehouses of accessible information. Wikipedia boasts over 3.2 million articles in English concerning domains ranging from science, the arts, humanities, pop culture and virtually every other aspect of humanity. It is essentially an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit. This statement does have some caveats, such as protected controversial articles; however the main premise is that Wikipedia is written collaboratively by people who use it. One fairly obvious ramification that arose after Wikipedia started gaining popularity is students’ use of it in the classroom. Students around the country, and in fact the world, have begun citing Wikipedia entries …show more content…
Wikipedia’s credibility and rate of inaccuracies has been much debated since its inception. Much of the controversy surrounding the use of Wikipedia in the classroom is based upon this underlying concern of its veracity. I will first draw attention to the most frequently cited study concerning this issue. This study, published in the journal Nature in 2005, compared 42 articles from Wikipedia and Britannica in the areas of math and science by having scholars review each. The results stated that 162 and 123 “factual errors, omissions, or misleading statements” were found in Wikipedia and Britannica respectively. However, upon closer inspection only four major errors, “such as misinterpretations of important concepts” were found in each of the compared sources (Giles 900). Given this data, a safe assumption can be made that Wikipedia is about as accurate as a standard print encyclopedia, at least in the math and science domains. For more evidence we can consider another study published by a German computer technology trade magazine called c’t. In this article the authors presented 66 dueling entries in the German version of Wikipedia, Encarta and a popular German encyclopedia. The scholars were asked to rate these articles from one to five (five being the top score) for correctness, comprehensibility, breadth and depth. Wikipedia scored a five for 24 articles as opposed to only 17 articles for the German encyclopedia and 12 articles for Encarta receiving the top score. Once again, it is evidenced by this study that Wikipedia is at least as accurate as print encyclopedias (qtd. in Luyt 319). As Chandler and Gregory aptly concluded in their article entitled “Sleeping with the Enemy: Wikipedia in the College Classroom,” “There is a tendency