Wiki Wiki What?

Research Paper. Wikipedia.

Those two different things go together like peanut butter and jelly, as they say. For a majority of high school students, research papers/questions usually begin with the infamous Wikipedia search. According to Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia is a free multilingual enclyopedia project supported by the non-profi Wikimedia Foundation. Not only are there usually the basic facts necessary to even begin research, but Wikipedia is easily accesable for the average high school student. Why not use it? Of course, there are always the pre-research warnings of only using Wikipedia as a source to gather ideas for further researching from other, perhaps more reliable, sources. However, how many students actually listen to this advice?

It is important to remember that almost anyone can go onto Wikipedia to edit a search page. I have realized that it is not only the high school student, but even college students and thousands of others who use Wikipedia frequently. One of my friends even likes to Wikipedia in his free time to read about random history or geography. Sure, Wikipedia is a useful tool that we all like to have at our disposal, but how far will we take it?

Apparently, some will take it too far. Irish 22-year-old Shane Fitzgerald decided to hold an "experiment" of sorts with Wikipedia. Majoring in sociology, he wanted to see how dependent the 21st society media-users was on this Wikipedia site. After inserting a false quote on the page of Maurice Jarre, several blogs and websites across the world were shown to have used this quote. The Wikipedia monitors immediately removed the quote, but the damage was done. Outraged, the authors of the sites critized Fitzgerald for his cruel prank; however, who was really the fool - Fitzgerald or the site-authors? To not even check the validity of the quote they were using on a public site reveals the fatal flaw of being too trusting of the Internet. Perhaps Fitzgerald's method of testing this theory of society's flaw was too rash and affected a bit too many people, but in the end, truth was revealed.

Today's society has become dependent not only on Wikipedia, but also on the internet and electronic sources in general. How ironic - since this blog is on the internet. So, remember, the internet is probably your second home, but remember to not become too dependent of the media. It's always a good idea to check your sources!