Today, we are going to talk about the crowdsourced informational encyclopedic website called Wikipedia. The website has sparked some controversy in academia because of its crowdsourced nature. Crowdsourcing, as defined by Merriam-Webster's website, is "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers." The source of Wikipedia's information is the whole of the internet. Anyone can sign up for an account and add/change content and the very nature of this source is where the controversy comes from.What is this controversy, you ask? Well, teachers do not accept Wikipedia as a source on academic papers because the validity of the information cannot be guaranteed. I agree with the logic behind this argument. Although Wikipedia has a group that tries to make sure that the information is as accurate as possible but that doesn't mean that some bad information doesn't get through. Wikipedia is also not peer-reviewed which makes teachers uncomfortable.
However, students, fear not. You can still use Wikipedia to dig for sources. If you are doing a paper on any particular subject, check Wikipedia and scroll to the bottom of the article. You can usually find a reference section. There you go sources aplenty.
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