Friday, 5 November 2010
Is the research you have reliable?
When it comes to using information that is secondary data, we need to make sure that the information we are using is correct and is in the context that we need it to be in. There are MILLIONS of websites online, and Thousands of books in libraries. But, how do we know if we can trust the information that is online or is in a textbook?
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A good topic to discuss here would be the reliability of Wikipedia. It has been butchered by many academics yet so many people turn to Wikipedia as a first source of knowledge. Type almost anything into a search engine and an article from Wikipedia will be one of the top results. A lot of the articles on Wikipedia are very helpful but from an academic point of view it should not be used because it is unreliable. An encyclopaedia is seen as a starting point of research and not an ending.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Dean on the idea of Wikipedia, it can be a easy way to get a background understanding on a topic due to the amount of information that it has within it. But the the information can be changed by other unhelpful users, which can leads to information being correct. Although there is a team that work within Wikipedia to make sure the information that is published is correct
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