Is Wikipedia a Credible Source or Not - Essay Example

Extra credit (Wikipedia) It is enough to say that we are living in an age of information overflow. If a wants to get information onhow to make an Ester by looking for instructions on the Internet, thousands upon thousands of chemical methods will be presented to them right on the screen in a split second from sources all around the world. We should carefully discriminate proper sources because all of the information found on the Internet is not reliable due to the ease in which anybody is able to post whatever information that they want on the Internet.

A lot of the information from the Internet is not trustworthy. Someone, even an elementary student, who is not knowledgeable in a subject can contribute to the Internet information databases. Students often go to Wikipedia to get the majority of information for their essays or research papers; however, this site especially is not trusted. An experiment that I did on Wikipedia has proven this statement. I wrote “My article was published in 2002” on the Nature (journal) on Wikipedia on May 27, 2007.

What I wrote was obviously worthless information; however, it stayed on the website for six hours. According to Wikipedia article traffic statistics, there were 867 hits on May 27, 2010. Even though there were a lot of hits on the same day, it needed to be caught for six hours. If I wrote something sound, for instance “Professor John McGuire at Harvard University published his biology article, a Novel Substrate of mTOR, Negatively Regulates Autophagy, in Nature on May 20, 2009,” someone would have believed this information, or someone would have used this in their essay as a resource.

Getting accurate sources from the Internet involves time to think about whether it is reliable or not. We should closely look at an author’s expertise, the title of the website, and the date of publication or latest update. As I set out to prove, Wikipedia is definitely not a credible source.