Simple tips to Use Wikipedia on paper Your Academic Paper?
Wikipedia is arguably world’s knowledge repository that is largest, with scores of entries on every thinkable subject. It is arranged in a quasi-scholarly manner and at first glance raises no doubt concerning the credibility and quality associated with information. Many students make the information presented there at its face value and get penalized by often their teaching institutions.
The matter is that Wikipedia is called a ‘free encyclopedia’ meaning that anyone in the field can sit back at his / her own computer and contribute to the general body of information there. This is what Wikipedia says about contributing articles to it: “just about anybody can edit almost any article at any given time, even without logging in”. Consequently, the biggest problem with applying this source is information credibility.
The credibility of information is just one of the cornerstones of academic writing – every claim that is being made in a write-up should be backed up with an evidence. Such evidence, in turn, should depend on the study data obtained in the course of an inquiry that is academic has got to be realized relating to fixed rules. Now, getting back again to the ‘free encyclopedia’ there have been numerous cases when students got misguided by best essay writers online utilizing information that has been freely available online. As a total result, teaching institutions have blacklisted this resource from credible types of information, tagging it as ‘inappropriate for scholarly writing’. In the event your school hasn’t made an explicit ban on this supply of information, almost certainly there was an unspoken agreement to prevent it, so make sure upon it before commencing your writing. The reality that Wiki happens to be banned from academia appears to yet be bad all things are not quite as bad as it may seem.
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Understand how to Use It: Search For Primary Sources
The same as about a ‘regular’ encyclopedia, Wiki attempts to back its claims up with references for greater credibility. The vast majority of articles there contain a special “References” section that is fairly similar to the “References” page of any scholarly entry. However, unlike an established scholarly source of information, the “References” portion of the ‘free encyclopedia’ contains references to various sources of information, including both scholarly books (articles, research etc) and less reputable sources like blogs, websites, forums etc. While doing preliminary research for your assignment, you should be able to easily collect some primary data by just studying the “References” section of Wiki. It will probably most likely give you a good listing of primary sources to work with.
Primary sources – are the ones sourced elements of information that have results of the research that is actual and in most cases contain all attributes of a scholarly piece of writing, including abstract, literature review, methods, results, discussion etc. This is basically the type or form of information you ought to be looking at – open the references and appear at their abstracts to determine if they be practical. Once you find the thing you need, you need to have a look during the “References” portion of this article you are searching for and try to look them up online. It’s going to be the iteration that is second of reference analysis in your paper that will provide you with the information you’ll need for writing your paper. It often happens the references are designed in text format instead of the convenient hypertext format. If so, go on and copy information that is such the name of the author, date and name regarding the publication and try to search it online. Chances are – in 8 cases away from 10 you will find the article you may need.
You are not allowed to cite Wikipedia – full stop if you are writing a scholarly paper. The key to citing these details is citing the actual source that is primary of, not the Wikipedia entry itself. For example, if you will be writing about Diabetes Mellitus and want to mention the role of Statin given that trigger of Diabetes, go ahead and select the reference that stands next to the word “Statins” – you will observe it has a reference to a piece of research by Sattar, Price et al. (2010). In that way you may be backing all your claims with references to reliable sources of information.
The “free online encyclopedia” is a trusted source of secondary information and really should be avoided in your academic writing. It can be of tremendous help while you are doing a bit of preliminary research and are seeking research results and scholarly investigations that scholars did earlier. Simply by taking a look at the references section of the Wiki article, it’s possible to have a good number of reliable ‘first hand’ information with consistent results and credible authors. Citing Wikipedia directly just isn’t allowed, however citing primary sources is a workaround that is nice can cause no objections.