Rant: I used to laugh at people who said Wikipedia is fine for research

For years I told students to stay AWAY from Wikipedia for any school project. I thought it was full of random people typing whatever they wanted. Then last semester I had to find information about a really obscure 1920s radio show for a paper. The library databases had almost nothing. I checked Wikipedia on a whim and found 3 citations to actual newspaper archives from 1924. I clicked through and those sources were legit. Now I tell people to use Wikipedia for the footnotes, not the article itself. Am I the only librarian who changed their mind on this?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kim13d ago

The footnote trick was a game changer for me too...

lisa_brown13d agoProlific Poster

And once you get comfortable with footnotes, you start seeing ways to layer them that really change how you read. It's like the text opens up and shows you all these hidden paths the author thought about but didn't want to shove in your face. That little 👣 can hold a whole other world if you let it.