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Should Wikipedia Be Used As A Reference Source?

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The use of digital resources such as Wikipedia is becoming a more common practice for university students when researching their studies. Many academics find Wikipedia to be an unacceptable reference source and generally will avoid using it in academic writings. Regardless of how popular it has become, Wikipedia should not be used as a reference source due to scarceness of research compared to an academic journal. Containing no credibility of the contribution to where the information came from, or how it was collected and is accessible to anyone, resulting in non-verifiable sources.
Wikipedia lacks research resulting in poor referencing sources compared to an academic journal. Academic journals are researched, peer reviewed and written by a …show more content…
Being such a high content source, Wikipedia is now becoming recognised as a more substantial referencing source, for example, after a decade of production Wikipedia now supports 3.8 million articles in all languages. And is now viewed by up to four hundreds of millions online views each month (Greenstein & Zhu 2012) By the start of 2010, Wikipedia was now being seen as an appropriate feature in advanced studies (Selwyn & Gorard 2015), however online users are no longer using dated practises when assessing information for academic writing (Lackaff & Cheong, 2008; Metzger, 2007).Wikipedia is accessible to anyone resulting in a non-verifiable sources. According to Carr (2010), online information has lead users to skim read instead of taking the time to understanding what is read, leading to a poorly written assessment( cited in Lim 2013). This may be due to being open to vandalism. Digital resources such as Wikipedia, allow online users to be able to add or edit the articles in Wikipedia. A general complaint being made about Wikipedia is that due to no peer review being involved in the articles and solely relying on people writing the article to actually know what they are stating, leading to confusion for students using Wikipedia (Leitch & Thomas M… 2015) in there writings. . To avoid plagiarism in academic writing it is critical for students to use book/articles that state the content of where the information came from allowing for a well written

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