Point/Counterpoint: Are Wikis Worth the Time? By Dean Shareski and Carol Ann K. Winkler

My first search on Wikipedia was to find a topic that I was very knowledgeable about, and being that I grew-up playing baseball I decided that it would be a good, simple first topic to investigate. I have been around, and involved in, baseball for the majority of my life and so I was not surprised to find that I was already familiar with most of the information that Wikipedia had to offer. I considered this to be a good thing because it reinforced the validity that was in question by Carol Ann Winkler in her article. This not to say that I believe the information to be entirely accurate because although I had possessed a previous understanding of most aspects of baseball, I still learned a thing or two about the history of the sport which I had to accept as true even though it could have easily been false. That is the risk you run when using a site such as Wikipedia in which anybody can submit information, accurate or otherwise. I considered the information in the article to be useful because had I lacked a decent understanding of the topic of “Baseball,” I feel as though Wikipedia would have effectively and accurately aided in developing an my understanding of this topic being that it is logical and contains links to related articles which tells me that the information must be relatively accurate if it relates to other articles on Wikipedia (such that it cannot be entirely false or made up).


After having used Wikipedia to research the topic of “tidal physics”, a subject that I am interested in yet do not entirely understand, I can honestly say that I felt as though my understanding of the topic had been improved. I was already somewhat familiar with the concept of ocean tides and the process by which they happen and the article in Wikipedia reaffirmed that previous understanding while at the same time built upon it by going into great detail of a relatively complex process. After reading the article about Wikipedia in which two individuals expressed their support, or lack there of, for the database, I was hesitant to accept all information at face value due to the fact that Carol Ann K. Winkler is entirely correct when she says that one must exercise caution when reading articles in Wikipedia due to the fact that the “content is endlessly morphing” (Winkler) and thus it is difficult to discern the truth as far was whether or not the articles contain quality information. In this case, however, the article seems to be accurate and very useful in the sense that it can be easily communicated.

As a future educator I am constantly faced with the task of preparing myself to be able to effectively communicate ideas and concepts to a group of people, which is a task that becomes less difficult if I have a certain passion around it. I have always believed that it would be fun and interesting to teach a class on art appreciation, the only setback being that I am nowhere near as familiar with the subject as I would need to be in order to teach it, so I decided to use that as a topic to research on Wikipedia. As mentioned before, due to very little previous exposure to the subject I was forced to assume that the information on history, styles, and theories was entirely accurate, however I practice better vigilance than that and thus I accepted the fact that the possibility that a portion of the information being inaccurate did exist. What is nice about Wikipedia is that along with the “See Also” section there are two accompanying section titled “References” and “Further Reading,” both of which attempt to validate the given information as well as promote further investigation of that topic or related topics. The information was useful and was displayed in a table of contents so that the reader could pick and choose which aspects of art they were particularly interested in researching. Another quality of Wikipedia that I enjoyed was that the explanations are what I consider to be a nice balance between SparkNotes' quick summaries and the long, drawn-out explanations given by many encyclopedias or scholarly sources, which both adds and possibly takes away from their initial impression in regards to credibility.

My impression of Wikipedia is that it serves as an interactive encyclopedia of sorts in which users ranging from grade school students to scholarly professionals can not only receive information but input their own as well. The problem with this, however, is that there exists the possibility of tampering with or creating false information within a database that is considered to be a useful and accurate tool for doing research. After reading the article “Are Wikis Worth the Time?” I can side with both observers in that I understand that this sort of medium in which any individual with access to a computer is able to have a substantial influence over the larger community of learners can be speculative, however I agree with pro-Wiki advocator Dean Shareski that Wikipedia is or will become “a model of how information will be managed in the 21st century” (Shareski) and thus it is necessary that educators consider this database as a possible source for conducting quality research. I also believe that Wikipedia does an excellent job of advertising the fact that the articles are not scholarly in source and thus must be taken with circumspection. I myself rely on Wikipedia while conducting research, however very rarely do I depend on it to be my only source of information while researching said topics, which is a research method practiced by most people seeking to better understand a concept/subject. Wiki is just one viewpoint of the many out there, and whether or not it is considered to credible is entirely one's own prerogative. However I do believe it should be at least considered as a possible source of reliable information.