New Rule: Wiki Citations are invalidFollow

So shall it be written, so shall it be done!

Wikipedia is no longer a valid cite for supporting arguments. This has been deemed by a college, therefore it must be true.

cite




Bookmark this as you are going to want to reference it.

Also,

Granted, I've only been writing college level papers since Wikipedia made its debut but I've never had an instructor who would accept Wikipedia as a source. On the other hand, almost all of them would agree that it may make a good starting point and lead you to finding acceptable sources.

One primary critique I've heard on a citation level is that Wikipedia entires are not "primary" sources but are someone regurgitating what they read from other sources. So you really should be using the primary sources, otherwise it's like citing someone else's high school research paper in your own.

Definitely not a valid source for anything academic.

If you are having an e-debate/catfight it isn't bad for finding relevant info quickly.

I thought wiki was so cool until I found out that anyone can edit it. After that I just read it for lunch break material and for trivial references. Once I went to read about Tito Ortiz and it said that he got his start as a "nude gay mud wrestler" and couldn't help but at the sabotage.

imdb.com, not Wiki, silly!

You can view and search by awards and nominations.

Edited, Feb 13th 2007 8:17pm by Debalic

And thus the Priestly Class has Spoken. For they alone possess the Divine Favor to interpret the Validity of His Proper Worship. /bow down

News Flash: Internet Causing Mass Panic in Academia, The End of the Monopoly is Near

I use Wikipedia as a starting point usually, or to look up random obscure stuff. Or to watch as they slowly delete all the webcomics on it, to save space for articles on obscure Marvel characters from the 80s.

Good sir! I hope you do not mean to imply that 1980's Marvel hero Longshot is less deserving of a lengthy article than early 20th century journalist and author Upton Sinclair!

I don't remember writing a paper past the 8th grade where a general encyclopedia was considered a valid source anyway.

Ya I'm sure I wasn't supposed to use them past around that age. However, I kind of feel these exercises were total wastes of time (at least in the areas of math or science) because at such a young age, you can't follow the real research and time would be vastly better spent learning new stuff.

In social sciences, even at that young age, you're citing material to support your own position and thus there is a creative element to it. One could slog through, say, the National Intelligence Estimate for "facts" but at the end, one is too often just forming an opinion from some set of other people's opinions.

Writing is phenomenally difficult but the true difficult in my line of work lies in distilling complex material to a clear but still relatively precise from. In contrast to school assignments in which the challenge is to actually demonstrate knowledge of a topic.

Instead, I'd recommend something along the lines of: toss the kids a pile of wire, tiny light bulbs and a battery and ask them to get as many to light as they can. Then ask for a clear presentation of how they did it in two forms (written, presentation) and grade for clarity, brevity and accuracy. Much more difficult! But they are the experts now - and they've got way too much to present in, say, five minuets, and they have to make a sales pitch (in essence). In my experience, you rarely have the opportunity to explain everything you know and good communication is, in fact, the opposite of school - not an opportunity to showcase what you know (in some large number of words) but rather an opportunity to interest another in what you know.