[Air-L] using wikipedia articles in academic paper

[Sylvie Noel]

I agree with Stephan. Because of its particular history and the type of 
writer it attracts, Wikipedia is a very good source for computer-related 
definitions and I have used it in my writing whenever I've wanted to give a 
quick definition of a technical term. However, I keep that kind of quoting 
to a minimum (I think I've used a Wikipedia definition at most once or 
twice in publications), nor would I trust Wikipedia on anything outside of 
the geek realm.



Sylvie

At 12:23 PM 5/7/2009 +0200, you wrote:
>Hello everybody.
>
>I think that Wikipedia is great for explaining technical details or
>information like "GSM" or "Atari", but not as a discussible source like
>primary literature. (With one exception: if Wikipedia is the object
>of investigation itself ;-) For people who know how to distinguish details
>Wikipedia can be a great help: If you know that the explanation of e.g. GSM
>is correct, so you can trust the Wikipedia article, why should you cite a
>user manual? My opinion is that the citation of a user manual looks quite
>strange in this context when you can use Wikipedia as well. Where should be
>the benefit of using the manual then?
>
>And, of course, this whole topic still seems to be a question of socialization
>and misunderstanding. I suspect that old school researchers tend to use old
>school methods and sources too often.
>
>Best
>
>--
>Dr. Stephan G. Humer
>Research Director, Digital Class, University of the Arts Berlin
>Senior Fellow, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
>
>For detailed contact information see www.humer.tel
>
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > recently I got the following comment from a reviewer of a paper of
> > mine:
> >
> > " *There is considerable use made of wikipedia and in an academic
> > paper this is disappointing. *"
> >
> > I was thinking, what is the general practice in using wikipedia in
> > academic paper writing?
> > and are there limits/rules/good practices that you follow, both in
> > writing and in review processes?
> >
> > If for example I am writing a paper on the peer review process in Open
> > Source development, I often use wikipedia articles as references for
> > technical terms, like "Diff", "CVS" or "Conditional Programming".
> >
> > Not being a Computer Scientist myself and thinking that the audience
> > of my writings won't be composed of Computer Scientists as well, I
> > feel that it is good to provide some basic references for complex,
> > technical and often obscure terms.
> > In this cases I prefer to use wikipedia articles, rather than Computer
> > Programming or Operating Systems manuals, because I think that those
> > articles are better and can be easily reached by anybody.
> >
> > On the contrary I never use wikipedia articles as references for
> > sustaining an academic argument or as references for authors (e.g. I
> > do not use the wikipedia article fo Harold Garfinkel, but I use the
> > book Studies in Ethnomethodology; I never use the wikipedia article
> > for referencing the "situated action" concept, but I use Lucy Suchman
> > book).
> >
> > So, any thoughts? comments?
> >
> > S.
> >
> > --
> > Italian Conference on Free Software 2009
> > http://www.confsl.org/confsl09/
> >
> > Stop the numbers game
> > http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1300000/1297815/p19-
> > parnas.html?key1=1297815&key2=1569876321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=25586
> > 362&CFTOKEN=14513600
> >
> > My institutional page
> > http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml
> > _______________________________________________
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Sylvie Noël, Ph.D. (psychologie), M.Sc. (ergonomie)
Chercheure scientifique | Research scientist
Centre de recherches sur les communications Canada | Communications 
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