I have been a fan of Wikipedia ever since I heard about it my junior year in high school. I’ve used it because it covers a wide array of topics and is usually fairly accurate on the information it presents.
Today as I was Wikipedia surfing I came across a page for John Coltrane and when I came to the end of the article it mentioned that his wife passed away in 2007. ‘Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t hear about her passing’, I thought to myself.
Later as I was on a music website I saw a news update “Alice Coltrane passes away”. Hold the phone, this is still recent news? Intrigued I took a look at the article and saw that she passed away Friday but it wasn’t even announced until Sunday. So it took someone 2 days (maybe not even) to go in and change Wikipedia to reflect current information. Obviously it was big enough news to be reported because she was a pianist in her own right but I was still astounded that within such a short period of time someone had gone in to change the page to reflect current events.
Of course I was aware that Wikipedia was constantly being edited and was current but this just reinforced that idea for me. Not that Wikipedia can be a complete replacement when doing research but this goes to show that compared to other resources Wikipedia is most likely to reflect current issues and be up to date.
I would maintain that whether Wikipedia can completely replace research really only depends on one’s respect for the course/instructor.
I’m obviously also highly dependent.
Wikipedia doesn’t need to completely replace research. It just needs to provide a place to start–value in its own right.