I’m sitting here celebrating St. Valentine’s Day by writing decision letters (mainly rejection) for my journal. I have an editor’s tip to share with all those willing to hear it:
Do not cite Wikipedia in your literature review or to provide historical background. Even once. And certainly not multiple times. It provides a heuristic device that virtually screams “REJECT ME.” For some reason, reviewers really seem to key in on these kinds of things….
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My first thought was “Oh My God!” I can’t believe someone would do that. I tell my students that Wikipedia is not a valid source, and I get a few shocked looks when I do. But surely anyone over the age of 25 knows what a real encyclopedia is? This is crazy!
It seems to me that the problem is not the reliance on Wikipedia per se in a research article, but reliance on any sort of encyclopedia. Citations to Britannica (or whatever) scream “Reject Me” in just the same way. General encyclopedias are not meant for use in original research, except possibly to point you to the primary sources you should be reading. I’d have much the same reaction if I saw citations to any encyclopedia in a college term paper, let alone a paper submitted to a journal.
What Kieran said. I mean, seriously, would any other such reference book be okay?
I tell students that it’s fine to use Wikipedia to find original sources. It’s actually quite helpful for that especially in certain cases such as comparative statistics since people have worked hard on bringing together numbers about related issues from different sources.
You’re making that up, aren’t you?
@3 uh, if the ONLY original sources a student can cite are the ones from a Wikipedia article, I give them an F in “doing research.” Using an encyclopedia as a starting point on a new topic is one thing. Ending there is another.
OW (5) - How would you even know if the sources all came from references in Wikipedia? (I can see how one could find out, but it could be potentially a LOT of work.) Maybe I wasn’t clear in what I meant.
A. Concerning the general question of citing encyclopedias (in working papers/journal articles/…) at all: Depends—from my point of view—heavily on
(1) what it is cited for (role of citation in the text): (i) The core argument of the paper OR (ii) a minor point (e.g.) in the introduction AND
(2) what is cited (content of citation): (i) Scientific arguments which are actually cited by the encyclopedia itself OR (ii) content which can be found just in the encyclopedia in question in this way (e.g. a comparison of statistics, provided by different institutions/organizations, which pretend to measure the same, however, provide different numbers).
If for both (1) and (2) (ii) is true, I would be fine with the citation of an encyclopedia. Put differently, if it is not the core argument of your paper AND an encyclopedia makes a good point in bringing stuff to your attention, then cite it! The alternatives would be (I) pretend—in not citing the encyclopedia—that the idea was/is your own idea OR (II) not write the paper. Do we really want that?
B. The reliability of Wikipedia.
I prefer empirical evidence as an argument. The evidence related to this question is (e.g.) this:
1. “Nature” conducted a nice study in 2005 comparing articles from Wikipedia (English version) to those by “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. Here is the article incl. much additional material:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
2. The German version of Wikipedia was reviewed and compared to “Brockhaus”, THE German encyclopedia. The result was (clearly) in favor of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I found no English summary. And—even more annoying—no report on the methodology at all…
@6 yeah, the only way to tell they have read only the wikipedia article is to read the wikipedia article. Basically, if you want to prevent plagiarism or sloppy research, you have to be willing to do extra work and make your students do extra work. You can insist that they submit a photocopy or upload a pdf of every source they cite, but it is annoying and difficult to do that much extra work. But this also relates to the thread over at newsocprof about plagiarism and turnitin.com as a turnitin report can often point you to the underlying source from which all the references have been cribbed: http://newsocprof.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/plagarism-and-turnitincom/#comments
@8, One of my high school social studies teachers used to randomly choose footnotes (eg “show me numbers 17 and 32″) and the student would have to produce the source. I could see one doing the same thing with a bibliography, since sociologists don’t normally have numbered references in the text (”show me reference 3, and the passages you used”).
OW (8) - I definitely think you misunderstood what I was trying to say, sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant to say that there are lots of helpful sources one can find on Wikipedia, sources that are barely referenced in the text substantively and mainly just included as a pointer so one would have to go and read them to really make use of them. Okay, I don’t think I’m doing a good job explaining what I meant. Just to be clear, I certainly didn’t mean that it’s okay just to use Wikipedia and nothing else. My point was that it can be a helpful starting point so to ban it as a resource overall seems unhelpful.
estzer @10 Sorry I seemed to be attributing to you an opinion you don’t hold. I was saying what I did because we do have a significant number of students who try to do their papers using only the sources they find in Wikipedia. In my class, part of the grade is on doing library research, and I want them to use multiple article databases. They would also get a low grade if their only source of articles was Sociological Abstracts or Proquest Newspapers. Apart from Wikipedia, there are a couple of vendors that sell pre-collected sets of articles on both sides of controversial issues, and I give a low grade if all their sources come from one of those, either. I want them to do their own library and Internet research, not just rely on the research of others. In particular, I want them to see that different kinds of databases differ systematically in the kinds of articles and in the content of opinions in them, and I also want them to locate sources that are written by members of racial/ethnic minorities and that are the actual opinions of grassroots people who genuinely advocate different positions, not just “mainstream” academic sources. I.e. the strategy I use for my own literature searches in Soc Abstracts for a sociology article would not be appropriate for the class I’m teaching. So I think the real point is that different classes/projects have different kinds of academic goals. I’m sorry that my comment could be mis-interpreted as implying that you approved of copying a Wikipedia article, which I knew in the first place you did not mean.
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