W5. Can we trust Wikipedia? – Clément Chevallier


To answer this question, I have a good example. During my high school, one of my teacher asked my class to search a date about an event. So some students searched on Wikipedia and told the teacher the date written in it. But it was the wrong answer because the teacher had voluntarily modified the page of the event just before the class. He wanted to point out the lack of perspective of the students and show that we cannot always trust Wikipedia.

I think some people use Wikipedia blindly and don’t take the necessary distance with contents on Wikipedia. They should be more careful and also search information on other websites.

Indeed, some contents on Wikipedia are not reliable, sometimes false. Some articles lack references and sources. Of course, they don’t represent the majority. Because Wikipedia and their users know this issue and implemented some systems to tackle the problem. For example, you can notify when you find an article not reliable. You can edit some articles, modify or erase some wrong sentences.

So we can trust Wikipedia in many cases but we have to be careful and check more the sources related to each piece of information.


Clément CHEVALLIER

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 6, 2018 at 9:46 PM

    Thanks for the amazing writing! That's very interesting example what you've experienced in High school.
    you wrote that we should check more the sources. I think we should have 2 steps to take information in Wikipedia, to check the sources.
    one- read carefully what has written on Wikipedia and check the sources are included.
    two- Check the sources are existing and have enough information :)

    Yun-Jin Kim

    ReplyDelete

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