Should students be able to cite "wikis," databases like Wikipedia which depend on the "wisdom of crowds," in their schoolwork? Why or why not?


In my opinion Wikipedia is a well known cite that you can get a lot of good information from. Wikis database is created by others information that is put in many. You yourself could put in a page of anything you would like, even yourself if you wanted. This cite in my opinion has a lot of good material that will help you get a better understanding of a topic and will give you information that you may not have known, but to cite Wikipedia as one of your references probably wouldn’t be such a good idea.
For example there are many people that like to mess with the system like I stated before people can write whatever they wanted even if it is already created. If I went into Wikipedia at this point in time and looked up York shire terrier dogs or yorkie for short for example I could say they were the largest breeds of dogs in the world. Which in fact there one of the smallest dogs of course someone would eventually look over it and fix it but within that time period of time that is was false you could of read over it and could of got wrong information.
Most of the information on there is correct from people see errors and correct them. For a student to use this wed cite and use this as a reference would not be a very good idea in my opinion cause previously stated reasons but to use just to get a fast and better explanation about the topic Wikipedia is a good cite to look over. Just make sure the information is right with other research maybe Google yahoo or ask .com are other examples of search engines you can use that people created that cannot be written over. So over all I would say no Wikipedia is not a good wed cite to use as a reference on a students work.