Friday, September 19, 2008
Wikipedia and Hyper-Linked Research
Following Casey's lead, now check out your topic in Wikipedia. Does an article exist on your topic? Is it an exact match? How does it compare with what you found in the Encyclopedia Britannica? In the print version there are, of course, no links. How does the presence of hyperlinks change the nature of your research? Tim Donahue
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9 comments:
An article on Wikipedia actually did exist on my search of "child soldier" whereas Brtiannica required me to be a little more thoughtful of my search term. This points out another positive note about using electronic resources. Each article can be tagged with keywords, such as child soldier, and then redirected to an article that is specific to my topic, in this case military use of children. So Wikipedia provided an exact match but it was through the use of keywords and redirection. I found more information than Britannica through Wikipedia, but a lot of that information needs to be checked to ensure that it is from a reliable source. I think that the presence of hyperlinks greatly enhances researching online but the researcher needs to make sure that the sources they are getting are reliable whereas book research makes it a lot easier to determine reliability of sources.
Mike Pasque
An article does exist on my topic through wikipedia, that was the exactly what I was looking for. The information from wikipedia was similar but not quite the same. I think my topic may be too broad, and if I was more specific it would be a little easier to find reliable information. Hyperlinks can be bad and good. Usually they are helpful, but sometimes they go off topic and can distract you.
I found a very extensive article on my topic of marketing. I am currently working on narrowing my subject to a smaller more reasonable topic. By using wikipedia and the hyperlinks they use, it is very easy to navigate around the site and everything that has to do with marketing. This is going to be my starting place for narrowing my topic down and figuring out which direction offers the most information.
when i looked up my topic, "body modeficatons" in wikipedia, it acts sort of like google. it gives me a short overview of my topic, but for the most part, gives links to other pages on wikipedia for more specific fields that are avaliable for research.
yes, I checked in wikipedia for my topic and I found quite a broad information about my topic. It listed its history, names of mountaineers, books related to mountaineering and so on. In other words, huyperlinks helped me a lot giving a wide knowledge about my topic. Well, I think wikipedia gave me a broad information than an encyclopaedia britannica gave me.
The article on my topic in Wikipedia was much more broad than the Encyclopedia Britannica. This was very helpful in finding more in depth information about the topic. The very basic information in the Encyclopedia Britannica was super helpful as a starting point. Hyperlinks on Wikipedia help greatly in my research. At the same time, as has been said, these links need to be sifted through to verify their credibility as sources. This does not need to be done with the Britannica articles.
Perusing the article related to my subject produced a much greater volume of information and literally dozens more useful links than was found through EB. As has been stated in class and by other classmates though, the information and the links need to be utilized circumspectly.The main body of the article, from what knowledge I have, appeared to be valid and from reliable sources. The links need to be traced out and judged on their own merits. I found many very useful links a few that were suspect but overall a valuable, worthwhile starting resource for someone new to the subject.
Wikipedia had lots of information on my topic the History of Skiing. I found that both sources Wikipedia and the Britannica to have lots of usefull information that I can use.
Andrew Koski
I looked on wikipedia for information about modern cannibals and was actually kind of disappointed. While there was plenty of information available about cannibals it was mostly archaic cannibals, historical examples and not many modern examples. There was some interesting insight as to how cannibals were treated in society, but all in all wikipedia kind of let me down.
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