Writing an Argument

Writing an Argument

Management/MGT 521

Instructor: Kenneth Santiago

Wikipedia is the largest source of free knowledge on the internet. Whether Wikipedia is credible is a very debatable question. The information available on the Wikipedia website is written by users such as our selves. There are so many different reasons why people have dinged Wikipedia as not a credible source of information, and have also banned Wikipedia, from being references within academic papers. One thing is true, however; Wikipedia has an enormous amount of information for just about every subject. That is the reason why Wikipedia is in constant debate. Wikipedia defines itself as a “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model (Wikipedia, 2011).

There are several different ways of identifying whether a source is a credible source or not. Some of those include an author of the webpage where information is being extracted, a copyright date or information on the website, properly sited information, and much more. Since Wikipedia is a unique internet type of encyclopedia that deals with more than the typical encyclopedia, a debate within my team allowed for us to dissect the reasons that some of us felt that Wikipedia was a credible source that just needed to be a little more vetted, and some of us felt that Wikipedia was not a credible source because of the way information is collected, edited, and processed. Most people believe in information they see on TV, or hear on the Radio or even read in Newspapers and Magazines and we know all of these sources are not always credible.

One of my team mates stated, Wikipedia can be a good start to gathering general information. However, this information should be verified by other sources because anyone can edit Wikipedia regardless of their knowledge or expertise on the topic. This implied that people of any age could edit information on the Wikipedia website. As a result, my team mate rated...