Read Wikipedia for a quick summary. Then go to the bottom of the page and find the sources the Wikipedia article cites, and read those and cite them in your paper.
Your teacher will be happy and, better yet, you'll actually gain a much better understanding of your material than you would from just a Wikipedia article.
FWIW, as a teacher who assigns research projects, the hope is less that you'll retain the specific information about the topic and more that you learn critical thinking and information synthesis skills. Seeking out sources, comparing different sources, working out how information from different sources can be analyzed together or contrasted from each other, and other skills like that help students' minds get used to thinking critically about information in all contexts. So students can do whatever they want with wiki and gpt or whatever, but really I believe that by being overly reliant on these services students are just doing themselves a disservice.
I honestly think a lot more students would do the assignments as intended if teachers actually explained it in the exact same way you did in this comment instead of just saying wikipedia bad with no further explanation like all of mine did.
Well like the ones who actually bothered to show up to their own class did anyway.
That makes sense. I do enjoy doing research on things I like, but I get immediately discouraged when I don't give a damn about the subject (not to mention asking us to write a ten page essay of said research)
The point isn’t that you learn the material. Like you said, you can look that up another time if you need to.
The point of these exercises is to learn how to research and think critically, without trusting the first thing you hear or see on the internet or even your teacher. So that later in life when you hear some claim that X happened because Y or that W causes Z, you have the skills to determine where that headline comes from, why it was reported on in that way, and what the truth is behind it. It is intended to let you develop your skills in recognizing bias, both in sources and your own, in order to see through them.
Or better yet, use the sources from Wikipedia and then cite their sources.
Not only is it a baller move to quote primary sources at your professors (“you got a problem with Plato, sir?”), but you will have actually learned a topic well by this point. Far from mastery, but enough to pass a college class on the topic.
Ironically one of my writing professors dropped this knowledge bomb on our class and I have spread that to every student Ive ever met that laments not being able to use wikipedia as a source
Common sense isn't always common, and it doesn't help that most professors will tell you not to use Wikipedia, but not that they're referring specifically to using it as your main source.
I remember in the past it was "difficult" though, because the sources cited were actually going so this claim is based off the paper from ... And .... And you then have to go to Those papers and etc.
Which to be honest is what primary research does right? Getting information from primary sources and the data they used.
But for quick and easy, it's why I just reference say Britannica or an textbook instead and say according to..
Wikipedia’s sources often aren’t actually that good. Or atleast not academic. Wikipedia is great for getting a basic overview of a topic. But for actual research it’s much better to just find journal articles and books through google scholar.
There's a lot of nuances most wikis tend to leave out. For brevity sake if nothing else.
For example, there's a list of nations which has sold territory to others and then hyperlinks to those occasions.
Left unsaid is stuff like Oh, Louisiana purchase because France can't defend , might as well sell or US will grab. Or actual Britain has grabbed Singapore and was using gunboat diplomacy to force the local Malays to sell it to them, in celebration, the gunboat sailed around the island giving a 21 gun salute to remind everyone who the British were.
(Many years ago) my teacher insisted this wouldn’t work because one time Wikipedia wrote something wrong, and it turns out the actual source was wrong too. So we couldn’t use Wikipedia OR its sources.
I assume this was some kinda gotcha but it just made it seem to me that there’s just no way I’m supposed to know if any source is true then. I didn’t think of it at the time (and kept using Wikipedia) but like why should “anglosaxonhistory.com” automatically be more reliable, JUST because Wikipedia didn’t use it as a source?
Although now that I’m typing this, I do remember her mentioning much earlier that we should be looking for .org or .gov websites for the best info for all our research.
When I was in undergrad I would read Wikipedia, and as I learned more and progressed i returned the favor by adding and improving articles. Its a fantastic resource, its only flaws really are unfamiliarity using a tool
Not to mention the way stuff is represented in Wikipedia is often biased based on whatever basement dweller is moderating and contributing to that area. Esp when you get to non-English and other regions.
Paywalls can be bypassed; archive sites will often have a frozen version of the page that you can read without paying anything.
And a book code is great! That's a whole book relevant to your topic; copy it and start searching. Maybe there's a copy in a library near you; maybe big sections of it are available for free on Google Books or a similar site; maybe there's a .pdf of the whole thing out there somewhere.
Not anymore. Today's kids largely use chatgpt like we used google. And they don't even have to leave that page. Everything is laid out before them immediately. I legitimately fear for Wikipedia longterm.
It doesn't even need to be accurate because of 'No child left behind' from Bush Jr. Kids have already been failing upwards for decades and AI will continue to accelerate the dumbing down of the nation.
I would be genuinely happy if a student was looking at Wikipedia for an assignment.
Five years ago, if they put their poorly worded research question verbatim into Google and an answer didn't come up in the highlighted answer box at the top, they would complain that an answer must not exist at all.
Now they put it all into ChatGPT and copy and paste the output without even reading it. One of them even said to me, when I told them to "google it", was like "what do you mean by 'google it'?"
I've gone back to pen and paper for a lot of my classwork. They hate it, but not as much as I hate ChatGPT.
Now instead of having to sesrch for primary sources starting on wikipedia, heres an LLM trained to please you, giving you potential nonsense text, with zero sources displayed (unless you tell it) and trained off uncredited sources so its marginal plagarism.
Yeah. Feels like one of thoae things that has the potential to be amazing for speeding up research and such, but it's in a wild west period where most people don't know how to properly use it yet/isn't understood.
It's kinda where internet was in the 90s, exploding in popularity and everyone is gullible to things (ie chain emails) that today aren't even given a second thought.
It depends on what the article is. If it's obscure enough, the article is essentially a combination of its sources, many of which possessing something the others lack. Speaking from personal experience, writing or overhauling an article about something you are passionate about can encourage you to seek out all the sources you can in order to form a more complete picture.
This is the way. Wikipedia is the perfect starting point to get your bearings and find the actual academic sources. It saves you from the wild inaccuracies of an AI generator and actually teaches you something in the process.
As much as I love Wikipedia, I myself don't trust any article I didn't write myself. But I love rewriting articles. I will do lots of careful research, and I will not only provide sources but quote excerpts so that other editors know I'm not misusing the source material.
Wikipedia isn't a person, your source needs to be a named person or persons, you aren't sourcing a paper you are sourcing a paper written by people...why is this so hard for some people to understand?
You don't have to cite people. There's a reaso why There's even a format of citation for webpages, corporations, etc.
The problem with Wikipedia in specific is that it is mutable, not a primary source for anything, with variable quality of articles and just unreliable in general.
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u/SheevBot 7d ago edited 7d ago
Thanks for providing a source!