It Can’t Be a Reliable Source

When I was in college, I hung out with John on a daily basis. John was my best friend in high school. While I loved sports and rarely studied, he loved studying and was a hard worker. He always got high marks, and he was one of the best students in the college. During our second year, John and I were taking a history class together. At the end of the semester, there was a final exam. The teacher gave us five questions one week before the exam day, and we wrote a short essay for each question. John was studying hard as usual for the exam. I was thinking that he was going to get a great score. John was thinking so too. However, his score on the final exam was bad. Why did he get a bad score, although he studied hard? There was a problem on a site he used. The site was Wikipedia. He mostly used it to study for the exam. Unfortunately, the information he got from Wikipedia was wrong. Because of its convenience, students want to use Wikipedia. It provides a great amount of articles on almost any topic. They have links to take the users to related pages, and give additional information. The language is pretty simple. I believe that Wikipedia is a useful and convenient site, but students should not cite and rely on Wikipedia, because of the luck of reliability and other problems that anyone can write and edit the articles brings, and the announcement by Wikipedia itself, “We do not expect you to trust us.”

The birth of comprehensive alphabetical encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert and the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were published in the 18th century (East 162). During the 20th century, the publication of encyclopedias had become more active (East 163). By 1961 people could have encyclopedias for most of main classes, and by 1970 it had become the fundamental basis of library reference work. The second half of the 20th century was the golden age of the encyclopedia. At this point, it was difficult to say computers would...