Wikipedia - A Reliable Source for Students? - Yea

Every lecturer warns us about the dangers of Wikipedia. Use it in your bibliography if you dare but chances are your grade will suffer. Obviously they don’t consider it a viable resource but who’s to say they’re right? Every student has used it at some point or another and most of us have used it in our coursework, whether we admit it or not.
I wouldn’t advise people to use Wikipedia as their main source, but I do believe it to be particularly useful. Textbooks have a tendency to jump back and forth on a topic, which can get quite confusing to put into context. You already have the information in front of you so why shouldn’t you be able to use Wikipedia to get a different opinion on the matter. If the information is wrong then you should be able to spot it yourself.
Timelines and charts, provided the article itself is solid, can also help clear up those awkward topics. Researching an upcoming essay on history in the World War II period, I put Wikipedia to the test and it got a Second Class honours from me. (I couldn’t bring myself to go any higher because it did lack the little lesser known facts that any history student loves). However the article was factually correct, it was well referenced and it cut to the chase. There were none of those rhetorical questions textbooks are so fond of that drive all but the hardened philosophy students into a depth of despair. On one page I was able to get the ever-elusive phenomenon of a detailed timeline. I had the date of every major battle, many minor battles and the all important treaties. No longer was I to trawl through page and page of text looking for the appendix where I can find a compacted timeline crammed into small page that I need to break out the magnifying glass to read the details. Now you may say that was just one article but in the interest of curing my boredom I looked up a number of other articles: the Irish Green Party, the gemstone Cuprite, certain breeds of dog, and my all-time favourite poet, namely one Siegfried Sassoon, and all were correct and well referenced. Then again, these would all get a lot of views or are academic in nature and thereby most likely to be correct. What happened then when I looked up my favourite webcomics? Well yet again Wikipedia impressed me with information which admittedly was less than the previous articles but it was none the less accurate and well referenced.
Perhaps the most important thing I can mention is the additional reading material provided. Every article I have looked at has provided good research materials to back up what they contain. Some are online sources but some went as far as to quote primary documents from history or highly reputable journals. I’m going to go against my own values and ask one of those ever irksome rhetorical questions. Why spend hours of time trawling through college databases for articles that have been hidden away in the farthest corner of the internet, when you can go to Wikipedia, check the validity of the article, and then use it to find those articles for you? As a hard working Arts student I don’t have time to waste looking for articles that may or may not exist, but I can tell you for certain that Wikipedia has an article on it, and that article will bring you to five or six other articles from more academically acceptable sites or publications.
Again I feel I must stress that Wikipedia is not always accurate, and there will always be some bad articles, but if you have paid attention in your classes then you should be able to tell quite quickly whether it is trustworthy or not. We cannot base any work on just one source, so if we are looking at four or five others than why can’t we use Wikipedia to get it straight in our heads, to organise it, and to bring us in other equally valid directions? If you were to look up an article on the Green Party and find it saying ‘the green party in Ireland are actually evil space aliens trying to take over the world’ then I dare say you know it isn’t reliable. No one can get away with just one source or one piece evidence, so it would seem almost impossible that you would get degree-ruining information from Wikipedia.
Granted the site is not going to give you any groundbreaking work, but it does simplify things; it puts them into context, it illustrates the point and it is trustworthy if you know how to use it. Articles can be written by anyone but they are subject to inspection and usually get said inspection within 24 hours. Wikipedia is a valuable and legitimate source for students of all subjects provided you have some idea what that subject is.