How to Use Wikipedia for Your Research

"Welcome to Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" recites the banner in the front page of the site. That doesn't really sound like something a student looking for accurate information for his research wants to hear, but that surely doesn't mean this is not a valuable site, with plenty of resources that can actually help you find objective information.

It's true: any user, even anonymous, can potentially edit almost every article to add or delete all the information he likes and, whether intentionally or not, decrease meaningfully the quality of an article. However, with just a little bit of attention on your side, you can easily work around this defect (which, after all, didn't stop Wikipedia from rapidly becoming the largest and most complete repository of human knowledge on the Internet) to extract from almost very article valuable and unbiased information for your research.

How to recognize an article that is unbiased from one that may not be? Even in what seems a well-written article, you usually can't be absolutely sure that each and every single sentence in it contains correct statements. As a rule of thumb, try looking at the number of references contained in the article (it's usually one of the very last paragraphs, towards the bottom of the page) compared to its length. A long article with few references is likely to have been written quite recently by very few users, which means the matter hasn't quite been discussed properly yet, and probably presents just a few points of view which may not cover the subject matter adequately. On the other hand, an article with a lot of references shows that the users took care of this aspect and you're more likely to find accurate information there.

Another factor to take into consideration are the so called 'meta-data' associated to the article. Wikipedia, just like many other wikis, offers many pages related to the article itself which very often help you decide on whether you should trust its content. Articles can be protected or unprotected (with the first ones being more likely to be accurate); articles who have been created earlier are likely to have been edited and peer-reviewed the most; an article with a lot of pictures, tables and charts shows that users put a lot of work in it. Two other factors you may want to look for are the article history (which details how many times the piece has been subject to bias and later corrected) and, last but not least, the quality rating of the article on the 'discussion' tab, which states what the community thinks of the article quality itself, with ratings ranging from 'stub' to 'featured article' (featured articles also show a little star in the main article page, at the top).

To sum up, when approaching a Wikipedia article for your research, I suggest you approach it by first considering how much you can trust the content in it by considering factors as:

1) its length;
2) {number of references} / {length of the article} ratio;
3) its protection policy;
4) the date of creation;
5) the article history;
6) the way it presents itself with pictures, tables etc;
7) its quality rating.

But, of course, you can still use Wikipedia for your research even if, all things considered, you are not too confident about the quality of the article. In cases like this, you are still likely to find accurate and valuable information in both the References and the External Links section, which will take you to external resources with third-party and independent information, and therefore using Wikipedia only as a secondary source of information.

Good luck, and don't forget to contribute yourself to the greatest encyclopedia on the Net!