Midterm Wikipedia Audit Process

I think the Wikipedia Audit process was a good project for this class. It gives us insight on the Wikipedia Articles and Entries by showing us that some articles are almost useless for scholarly work. Most of the professors ive had at Rutgers, if not all, do not allow students to use Wikipedia as a source for research papers. I agree with this, Wikipedia should not be used as a scholarly source to research topics. As we have discussed in class, it can be used to look up a subject for a broad overview, but for detailed facts and points, the subject should be backed up by other sources such as news sources or medical journals for example. The Wikipedia's strength is to have a common place for people to search topics they are not familiar with to get familiarized with it, but it's weakness comes into play when it needs to be used in a scholarly manner.

As we all know, the American society is somewhat lazy to say the least. Technology, i believe, has had a big impact on American laziness. Since encyclopedias were all made of paper before Wikipedias addition to online search engines, people have become dependent on technology to get tasks done faster than they could before. Bottom line, technology has given individuals all this information readily available at their finger tips in mere seconds. And it has effected American culture tremendously in terms of a lazy and spoiled society.

Overall this project was a well designed assignment. The only thing i would say about the process is announcing the assignment earlier in the term to allow for students to organize better and create even better presentations. Other than that, i enjoyed auditing a Wikipedia article and have become aware of the liability of the sources in Wikipedia articles and the pages content.