Five ways Wikipedia can help you write that history paper
Photo taken by the author.
You must have heard it countless times: Never use Wikipedia for research. It is unreliable, it is open for editing by everyone, and it cannot be used to write a paper—the end.
But I think demonizing an entire platform that is readily available is counterproductive. While I recognize the dangers of uncritically relying on Wikipedia and citing it as a reference for a paper, I cannot discount the great potential of productively utilizing the platform for the many benefits it can give students in specific use cases. So here are five ways that Wikipedia can actually be useful in writing your history paper. Heck, any paper, for that matter.
By understanding what Wikipedia is.
What is Wikipedia? It is a free, Internet-based encyclopedia. It is open-source; thus, anyone can contribute or edit the encyclopedia entries or the pages on the site in theory. Since we are not certain regarding the expertise of these editors and contributors, we must practice caution when reading anything off the website. By understanding what Wikipedia is, we are reminded why we are on the site in the first place, and that is point number 2.
By using Wikipedia as a quick, ready reference.
Want to quickly know specific information about something? Wikipedia can help. It can serve as a way to get a general overview of whatever topic you want to know about or do research about. Wikipedia can serve as a way to familiarize yourself with a specific topic before you do your own deep dive into finding actual resources to do your research. But even in treating Wikipedia as the starting point of your research, be sure to check the reliability of the page and the sources. If there is any doubt, be ready to confirm by using more reliable sources of information.
Wikipedia can help you discover related terms and keywords that you can use to search for more information or associated sources for your research. Let’s say you’re working on a paper about Andres Bonifacio. A cursory reading of the Wikipedia entry on Bonifacio provides you with related personalities, places, and events that could serve as new keywords that could be used for another search. The more you become familiar with the topic, the better you can find suitable references for your research. Wikipedia helps you, in that case, as a starting point.
By not citing Wikipedia as a source for your paper.
The topic you are writing about was comprehensively discussed in Wikipedia to the point that you feel like just citing Wikipedia instead of finding a different reference. Stop. You can’t. Go back to the first item in this list. Then the second. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. It is so far from the original source that the information it brings has been regurgitated at least twice before it was fed to you. So no, don’t cite Wikipedia, and don’t take the information you get from it as fact. Confirm and corroborate any information you get from the site using reliable sources.
You must be pulling out your hair in anger by now. Where are these “reliable” sources that we keep on harping about? Well, some of them are actually in Wikipedia already. How do you find them?
By looking closely at external references linked on the page.
There is a section at the bottom that lists and links to various sources used by the authors of the page. These sources come in all shapes and formats: they can be news articles, books, websites, pdfs, among others. Some of these are readily available online, while some could be loaned through your own library. If you’ve familiarized yourself enough by critically reading the Wikipedia entry, when you plunge to the actual primary (and relevant secondary) sources, you can now better understand and appreciate them. And these appropriate primary and secondary sources are the ones you cite as sources of your paper, not the Wikipedia page. By the way, there’s another way that you can ensure that you are critically reading a Wikipedia page.
By keeping an eye on the footnotes or endnotes.
As you read, you will notice the numbers in the Wikipedia entry. You know, the blue numbers that you forget to remove when you copy-paste the paragraph to your paper (tsk tsk!). These indicate the references of the article or other relevant information that could provide clues to the validity of the claims presented in the article. Sometimes, you will also see “citation needed” in the article. This note indicated that the claim lacks proof. Seeing this, you already know that you should be wary of the information being presented to you.
These are but basic ways of making Wikipedia work for you. The Internet is a wonderful treasure trove of information and simultaneously a bottomless pit of garbage, so knowing how to sort what is reliable from what is not is necessary to make the most out of this technology. Wikipedia itself recognizes that it is not necessarily a trustworthy source of information at all times. But knowing how to use it to your advantage could help you ace that paper.
