Back in the day, as part of their punishment for academic impropriety, students had to attend a presentation by yours truly on avoiding plagiarism (having attended the presentation, they felt duly punished). While researching the presentation, I generated enough material for another presentation, on evaluating websites. Some of the material can be found here, though not this germane cartoon or this one. Type "AIDS facts" into Google and click on result number 3. Do you think this page is accurate?
Basically, anyone can write anything on the Internet, and a lot of the time they do. When you are using the Internet for research purposes (why are you doing this? Use the library's electronic resources first!) you cannot use the same criteria as you do when you are surfing the net for pleasure. Wikipedia is often the first port of call for students doing research, and it's a great site. I use Wikipedia frequently. However I don't use Wikipedia for research purposes because I wouldn't trust it to be accurate. Fair enough, the vast majority of vandalism is noticed and removed quite quickly, but what if you visit the page before heinous errors are corrected? I once looked up Swinford (County Mayo) on Wikipedia and found that the town is notable for werewolves and pot smuggling. Yeah, right.
If you want to look something up, for academic purposes, use an online encyclopaedia, the library subscribes to Britannica Online, the online version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB). EB has more a lot more cachet and credibility than Wikipedia for academic topics. There was a study published in Nature in 2005 comparing Wikipedia and EB. Surprisingly, Wikipedia was claimed to be nearly as accurate as the EB, however this study has been comprehensively refuted (albeit by EB themselves). So please use Britannica Online where you can.
Britannica Online is available directly on-campus and via EbscoHost Integrated Search off campus
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