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About Wikipedia: Evaluating Wikipedia

Wikipedia - a great place to start your research, a lousy place to end..

Evaluating Wikipedia Articles: A Checklist

  • Assess the article's quality
    • Check the article's grade on the article's talk page.
    • Is the article's topic explained well?
    • Are the Wikipedia style conventions followed? Is there an introductory paragraph? Is the article broken up into seperate sections?
    • Does the article provide in-line citations? Are the sources appropriate for the information in the article? Are the sources authoritative?
  • Look at the article's history page and talk page
    • Check the article's creation date.
    • Look to see how many editors have contributed to the article. Has the article been created by only one or two people, or has it been a collaborative effort among many editors?
    • Has the article been subject to heavy or continued vandalism?
    • Have there been discussions about the article's validity?
    • Does the article appear to be controversial?
  • Pay attention to the template messages that appear at the top of, or within, an article.
    • Make sure to read the template messages (the boxes at the top of the page or section) if they appear in Wikipedia articles. They can inform you of any issues with the article such as lack of references and sources, the presence of unverified or unreliable information, or if the article requires clean-up, etc.

Remember, Wikipedia articles can be a good starting point, but you should also be sure to use other, more scholarly sources of information as well.  Please use Wikipedia responsibly and wisely!

Wikipedia Article Grading Scheme

Click on this table to view a larger version.

Why Learn to Evaluate Wikipedia Articles?

Wikipedia is a collaborative effort in creating freely accesible encylopedic content. Because of the collabortive nature of Wikipedia, and that changes can be made by anyone in real time, Wikipedia articles develop at different paces and are, therefore, not created equal. The quality of Wikipedia articles range from excellent to very poor and this page will give you tips for evaluating a Wikipedia article's quality.

Attribution/Credit for Page Content

The content on this page is reused through the LibGuides community from the William H. Hannon Library.
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