UEL Info skills

• KB: Kevin Byrne - Senior Lecturer, University of East London
• SB: Sharon Brown - Principal Lecturer, University of East London

KB: If a student wants to use Wikipedia, I would say that it’s not a bad place to start in as much as they can get an overview of what it is they’re looking for. Perhaps get a flavour for the issue. But what I would suggest is, if it actually comes to using it as a reference point in their work, it indicates that they’re not researching the subject area properly. Possibly that they’re being lazy by going there as opposed to going elsewhere. What I would also point out is that it’s open access which means that the information on there can be changed by anybody at any time.

SB: Wikipedia’s always a thorny issue for students. It is a good resource and it can be a good starting point for research but Wikipedia has many problems, one of which is it’s written by ordinary people - some of which will be referenced, some of which will be researched, but it might not be in the best possible way. The second thing about it is the information is not always in the most accessible format. Sometimes the English on a Wikipedia page is not as good as it should be and therefore it can be confusing about what the entry is about. I suppose the third thing I always think about with Wikipedia is, it’s often the first search on Google which, to me, often shows that students haven’t done any more research. So they haven’t gone to the second or third or the fourth page that’s come up, they’ve gone to the first one, they’ve taken everything they’ve read and they haven’t backed it up. At university level, you should be looking at more than one source to back up your information.