Assignment #4: Part II

I found that this assignment was fairly easy to complete because Wikipedia was such a ready source of information. However, I don’t think that from the material available I was able to get a clear picture of the history of Valentine’s Day as a holiday. Some material was out of sequence, and I also relied entirely on one source because I knew that it would have a great deal of information on the subject. There was also no way for me to know whether the information on Wikipedia’s page is good without going through it’s source page and double checking its sources, which would be a time consuming process.

Overall I would say that the temptation is strong to rely on sources like Wikipedia for quick retrieval of information because it is so convenient. Correct information typically emerges over time and typographical and factual errors are weeded out. The real trouble with Wikipedia in my opinion is that you don’t know what state the information is in when you check it. While readers wait for digital democracy to pan out in the editing process, the information on the page in the meantime may not be entirely accurate. For this reason I can’t fully sympathize with Wikipedia’s stated objectives of making the store of human knowledge “available to all.” On the other hand, it is an extremely convenient source and perhaps an important educational tool, if only to get readers interested in more in-depth reading on their subject of interest.

The debate over Wikipedia itself can get fairly heated among particularly devout nerds, and a study a few years ago determined that on average it was as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica; a finding that the other publication of course rejected. I tire of the constant attacks against Wikipedia, acknowledging its flaws as a scholarly source. As long as articles are properly sourced and peer reviewed, I think that it is a fine source for casual interest reading, and as a nexus site to research relevant topical sources; it just shouldn’t be relied on as a single source, as I did in my post below.