Argument Against Wikipedia

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“Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 400 million unique visitors monthly as of March 2011 according to ComScore. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia”. (Wikipedia 421) Does this make Wikipedia a legitimate citation source? Since there are no rules on what a visitor can change on any kind of article/topic, it’s hard to say that Wikipedia is a citation source. For Wikipedia to be more of a citation source, Wikipedia staff should enforce stronger laws/rules for contributors on the website. It is a fact…show more content…
Some may even protest or go against these rules, thinking that they will restrict of the changes they are allowed to make. However, these rules will truly benefit everyone who goes on Wikipedia; it will lessen the unintentional mistakes that participants do. Messer - Kruse, (411, 412) an author, was going through a Wikipedia article on the Haymarket riot/trial of 1886, which he said, part of the information on the article was misleading. Thus he was trying to make a correction on the article. Wikipedia did not allow Kruse to make these changes because a rule was already present, saying that changes cannot be made, if there are no reliable sources present, and that a minority view cannot be replaced with a majority perspective. Randall Stross, (419) also an author discusses the policies that include the “semi protection” law, which is the policy that says that a volunteer is not allowed to make changes to a page without registering four days earlier. Stross is saying that these kind of laws are not enough for this website to be a citation. Although Kruse and Stross took this personally at some point, the Wikipedia Staff are only trying to invoke these kind of guidelines, so that no editor feels like they are being personally challenged, but follow the laws that are already there on the Wikipedia site. To make these policies more…show more content…
The meaning of this is that, Wikipedia pretty much lets anyone and edit articles, and some edits can mislead the reader, which makes Wikipedia less of a source to actually trust, because we have no idea who wrote what, and why exactly these corrections were made. Having stronger rules for the writers will allow Wikipedia to set high standards for writing or changing things like facts, making Wikipedia a respected and useful resource on a college level. The Stanford Daily discusses about this particular topic- whether Wikipedia can be used as a citation source or not. The History Department at Middlebury College (“The Stanford Daily” 428) say that Wikipedia is banned for academic purposes, declaring that it is not legit for college students to use, because if the student’s work does include Wikipedia as a source, it reflects the student’s work as poorly done. The biggest issue that Wikipedia faces today is the fact that Wikipedia is not a credible source, or should not be used in papers. A rule that the Wikipedia staff should implement on Wikipedia is, whenever a contributor makes an edit, it should be made sure that the contributor has credible sources on where and why they alternated the information on a particular article. Once the staff presents this policy, and putting high standards for the writers on Wikipedia, not only will this make this site more trustworthy, but

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