Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Wynton's waxings on Wikipedia


Wynton Heading, (soon-to-be-retired) Manager of Academic Library Services at UniSA, launched this year's Writing in the Sciences series with a somewhat scathing attack on Wikipedia - the collaborative 'free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'.

'The problem with Wikipedia is the 'anyone' aspect', says Wynton. This has led to lots of discussion about whether it should be used in the University context.

Wynton used an example of the Wikipedia entry on climate change, to highlight the subjectivity involved in the use of Wikipedia:

The excerpt here is clearly full of biases which do not add to the serious debate or body of evidence around climate change.

Wynton readily acknowledges Wikipedia is a useful source for background reading and even praises the mega-website for pointing out parts where 'citation' is needed. However, Wynton points to the more scholarly sources of the UniSA library databases * as being the best way to go for an academic piece of writing.

Here are but a few:
  • Web of Science (a five star database, according to Wynton)
  • Scopus
  • Inspec
  • Compendex
  • IEEEXplore
  • Academic Search Premier
He also mentioned Google Scholar as an 'invaluable' tool because it can trawl through most of what is on the UniSA library web.

Best of luck with your retirement, Wynton!

Andrea

* Apologies to our Writing in the Science visitors who are unable to get into password protected resources at UniSA


No comments: