In my opinion, Wikipedia has more cons than pros. For one thing, the authors are anonymous. You have no way of knowing if the information you're receiving is coming from a creditable source or not, therefore you don't know if it is true or not. False information is another big con of Wikipedia. If you're trying to research something, you most likely want accurate information, and with Wikipedia, you don't know for certain if you're getting that. One pro I see of Wikipedia is that if you are a professional on the topic, and you know for certain something is false, you can change it. Another pro is the easy accesiblitly because it has different pages for each category.
As far as encyclopedias, a pro would be that there are a large amount of them and often they are categorized into different topics. Another pro is that they have sources for the information and you can easily find who published the book to know if the information is accurate or not. A con of encyclopedias is sometimes they don't contain complete information. Important information can be left out.
When looking for encyclopedias on my topic, steroid abusers, I went to the library catalog and did an advanced search. I typed steroid abuse and encyclopedias. Unfortunately, this search had absolutely zero results. :( But the I saw something farther down on the page that said: Search other libraries in the Consortium for steroid abuse and encyclopedias? I don't really know what this means, but I clicked it anyways and found two pages of encyclopedias. Though, not all of them related to my topic. I did find about 4 that did.
When looking for an E-encyclopedia on steroid abuse, I used the EBSCOhost page from the library website. I again type in steroid abuse and encyclopedias in the search box but there was only one result on a book that was titled Health Issues, so that didn't help me much.
Since I wasn't able to locate and encyclopedia on steroid abuse in the Miller Center, I can't really answer if an encyclopedia or Wikipedia would be better for my research project. Though, after looking at the pros and cons of both, I think I would prefer to use an encyclopedia because I can just trust it more.
Hi Whitney,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post on encyclopedias and Wikipedia.
If the term "steroid abuse" did not work as your search string for an encyclopedia, what other keywords or phrases might you try to find an encyclopedia with an entry on steroids or steroid abuse?
"Search other libraries in the Consortium" means that the Miller Center Library online catalog will also search the catalogs of other libraries that are part of our interlibrary loan system.
Please try searching again for an encyclopedia that would address your topic (print or electronic) and locate one entry that addresses your topic. Apply the evaluation criteria that we discussed in class to this entry, and compare it to the Wikipedia entry, using that same evaluation criteria. Let me know if you have any questions...I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Professor Wexelbaum