As online research has become an increasingly standard activity for students Wikipedia has become one of the top visited websites. The online encyclopedia is educational and has viewpoints from various sources. Wikipedia has created a conflict over whether the information published on the site is reliable. How credible is Wikipedia?
Critics of Wikipedia point to the site’s universal editorial access as its most egregious fl aw. For many, that no mechanism exists to prevent someone from posting bogus material either intentionally or through ignorance dooms Wikipedia as a credible and useful information source. Wikipedia is more like a library (or like the World Wide Web itself) than like a typical reference work. The mere fact that a book is in the library is no guarantee against bias or misinformation. The same can be said of Wikipedia articles. This does not make them useless, it just means that they should be approached differently than one approaches a typical reference work. Articles should be examined for their documentation, and these sources should in turn be scrutinized; readers should review the discussion page and the history of changes to the article to gain insight into recent edits; related topics can be explored via hyperlinks within the article; questions or concerns can be posed to Wikipedians on the talk page. Above all, visitors should recognize the malleable nature of the site and so exercise critical judgment about the information they encounter. What makes Wikipedia seem so dangerous to some teachers—its inherent malleability—is also what makes the site a dynamic and authentic demonstration of the research process itself. Granted, if students use Wikipedia as just another reference source (or their only source), then they will get no more from it (and possibly less) than a traditional encyclopedia in the school’s library. But if