Forwarding pl. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Declan <[email protected]> Date: 14 February 2012 07:46 Subject: Re: Citations, the Internet, and Wikipedia
There was an interesting article comparing scientific accuracy in Wikipedia with Britannica published in Nature: Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Giles, Jim; Nature; Dec 15, 2005; 438, 7070; Britannica rebutted the article and Nature fired back. Fascinating, but ironically you'd need subscriptions to read the articles :) I grade papers regularly and I do not accept Wikipedia as a citation; nor do I accept Britannica. If I published a scholarly article using Wikipedia (or Britannica) as a cited source, it would in all probability be weeded out during the editorial process. This is the standard for my field and I therefore hold my college students to the same standard. It's not about the quality of the source; rather it's about primary Vs secondary sources. Having said that, I regularly encourage students to use encyclopedias as starting points in their research. I use Wikipedia for rapid facts for my own work. Personally I find it approximates traditional encyclopedias in many ways and I find the graphics very convenient for lecture presentations. It's also easier to use than many online encyclopedias. I needed information about kuru today - started in Wikipedia; grabbed some nice graphics regarding prion replication; moved on to the New England Journal of Medicine for maps; genotypic frequencies of resistant alleles etc. The images from Wikipedia I could choose to share online and reuse in any way I liked (public domain image in this case). The NEJM images - I could purchase a slide set for $15 and reuse would involve some sort of copyright process I'm sure. Importantly, the Wikipedia information on kuru was spot on and cited the NEJM paper that I also used. My take home is that Wikipedia is as useful a traditional encyclopedia. Neither is a primary source, and I ask my students to use primary sources. But consider this: many if not most students use primary sources incorrectly. They pull information from the introductions......and introductions are written on the strength of other published articles.....introductions are in fact secondary sources embedded within primary sources. Oh the joys and complications that presents....I'm ranting slightly....clearly I should be grading lab reports on natural selection in goldenrod galls. -- With regards, J.M.Garg ([email protected]) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jmgarg1 'Creating awareness of Indian Flora & Fauna' The whole world uses my Image Resource of more than a *thousand species* & eight thousand images of Birds, Butterflies, Plants etc. (arranged alphabetically & place-wise): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:J.M.Garg. You can also use them for free as per Creative Commons license attached with each image. For identification, learning, discussion & documentation of Indian Flora, please visit/ join our Efloraofindia Google e-group: http://groups.google.co.in/group/indiantreepix (more than 1800 members & 1,06,000 messages on 31/1/12) or Efloraofindia website: https://sites.google.com/site/efloraofindia/ (with a species database of more than 6000 species). Also author of 'A Photoguide to the Birds of Kolkata & Common Birds of India'.
