I am mostly working from home this month (I still have clinic a few days per week) with the goal of answering one question: Is Wikipedia accurate? Wikipedia is easily one of the most polarizing sources for information available, especially in academia. Teachers hate it and students love it and most people have formed some opinion on the site. I admittedly love the web site and the whole concept behind the site and have developed a formal plan to answer the question of Wikipedia's reliability as a source of information.
As far as I know, every medical resident in the country has to participate in a research project during the course of their residency. The requirements for my project were quite broad. It has to be academic and focus on some aspect of medicine. That was the only requirement. As I said, I use Wikipedia quite frequently and some of my colleagues even make fun of me for doing so. I decided to focus on this amazing source of information to determine how accurate (or inaccurate) the information contained on the site actually is. In the coming posts I will explain how I went about answering this question. Stay tuned. The results might surprise you.
The information I got on my foot corn seemed helpful.
ReplyDeleteI tend to go to Wikipedia first and then use their citation links to get to the more "credible" source to cite. It's all the same information but not having Wikipedia on the reference page makes the professors happy.
ReplyDeleteThat's probably a good idea. It's interesting that both sources use the same information, but depending on the title of the reference one is seen as credible while the other is written off as inaccurate.
ReplyDelete@Joe: That's not surprising that the info was helpful or that you went there for info. I'll explain the helpfulness not being a surprise in subsequent posts. Wikipedia is the 6th most visited web site in the world and has 150,000,000 daily users. It ranks highly in Google search results which studies have shown has a major impact on which sites people visit.
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