A parasite called Wikipedia

According to Martin (2008), “seven percent of all internet users now visit the site every day” (para.13). Everyone knows what Wikipedia is used for. It will become the most welcome website, because you can find any information you need, especially for free. Also, there are not any complicated registered steps. So it is easy to spread the world. However, the issue which comes out with the “famous” Wikipedia is that the students use it for their academic study. For many negative reasons it is not a good source for students to use while writing an essay which should be formal and authorized. Surely, students should not be allowed to study with Wikipedia.

The first reason against using the Wikipedia is that it violates the copyright of the certain people. Every day there are millions of people surfing on Wikipedia. And most of them are students who want to copy some academic sentences in their papers. But is that ethical? Of course not. The information posted on the website is copied by someone who copied from some others` academic papers on which those professors spent several years. Those students who use the information had infringed the copyright. Those researchers devoted themselves to study for several years, which is destroyed by the Wikipedia visitors with two clicks in two seconds. Where is the ethics of those people? Don`t they know they should respect the author`s rights? Moreover, the students who accept the advanced education are the powerful symbols of the country. How can we allow them to do the immoral behavior? Instead, we should teach them to respect others` achievement which they will achieve someday.

The next factor that is opposed to getting information from Wikipedia is that the information may be wrong. According to Wolverton (2007), “it is not the number of the articles available on Wikipedia that is up for debate, though. The argument amongst scholars is that the information available on Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate and that the articles themselves are particularly susceptible to internet vandalism” (para.11). That means people who post or add some words on Wikipedia can write whatever they want, because they even need to register their names. So the information on Wikipedia cannot be correct. For example, if someone searches for the definition of horse and he found that it is a kind of animal with two big eyes and four long legs…, he may probably printed the definition and point to a frog and say, “it is a horse.” So the information posted on Wikipedia has no confidence in the information. Therefore, students cannot use the information on Wikipedia.

The last concern of banning the site to students is that is damages the academic study. As Wolverton (2007) told, according the company called Alexa Internet which inspects the Websites and solves the problems in them, Wikipedia has already been in the top 10 most popular websites in America by Jan. 15, 2001. It is obvious that many students look for and use the information from Wikipedia. What could be the result? It would increase the dependence on Wikipedia for students. They will not ponder about their courses. What they are going to do is just looking at the screen and clicking the right button of the mouse to copy. Over and over, students would get lazy and lack of creativity. fewer and fewer people will do the real academic research. Is that what people expect to do with Wikipedia? The answer is no and never. So students should be forbidden to put something from the Wikipedia in their papers.

In conclusion, the students should keep very far away from Wikipedia. First, we should respect others` creatures which are without any knowledge of the writers. Second, the content on Wikipedia may be faked and would mislead people to a terrible result. Third, Wikipedia would kill the spark of creativity of the educated students, because more and more people are dependent on it but not on themselves. So Wikipedia is not a useful tool to study academics in the university. It is just a website to enlarge our personal viewpoints. Finally, students should use it when they are working on a paper and should have a medium way to regard its value.

Reference
Martin, N. (2008, Jan. 21). Wikipedia clamps down on ‘unreliable’ editor, telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved Apr. 23, 2008, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/20wiki120.xml
Wolverton, J. (2007, Jan. 27). Wikipedia Wisdom, Valley Vanguard, Retriedved Apr. 23, 2008, from http://www.svsu.edu/clubs/vanguard/stories/1141