Evaluating Wikipedia

Today we will continue to challenge the reliability of the renowned source identified as Wikipedia. To achieve this I will be researching two Wikipedia articles about unrelated topics, which I am familiar with, and analyse its accuracy to the information provided. The following articles I have decided to investigate are my favourite musical artist, Gwen Stefani (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Stefani), and my favourite television show, Will and Grace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_grace).

After reading the two articles I found them to be quite accurate and descriptive. It may be that these article topics which I choose to look up where not extreme contents that have particular different views and are straight forward facts, but I found the sources to be quite informative and analytical correct. The articles showed chronological order of events and covered all the basic facts that you’d require to understand who ‘Gwen Stefani’ was and what ‘Will and Grace' is about.

In regard to the guidelines Wikipedia has placed, once again the articles were portrayed according to the recommended procedures and it constructed by the grouping technique and is built in a professional manner. In particular, I noticed how the article was up to date with Gwen’s current pregnancy of her second child showing that the piece had been update regularly to include present information. The information was organised in a fair and balanced manner and did not create a sense of bias side to a particular argument. The only wrong things I could find in the articles were some unsuitable and irrelevant information provided and the presentation of the information to be overloading. The writing quality of each subsection of the articles in grammatical and structural qualities is terrible. In most paragraphs, they lack any cohesion and trail off with facts without conclusion. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, and style and clarity is ignored.

If I had to make any changes to the article it would be to present it in an essay style cohesive flow between with subsection grouping of information e.g. from music career, non-musical projects, personal life and public image. Apart from the fact that I love Wikipedia as a resource and do agree it can contain unreliable data in some instances; however in this investigation on my chosen topics I found it to be accurate. In conjunction to the production of unreliable date it is cited directly from the Wikipedia research page: "It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish".

From this course, I have now learnt to not trust everything I read on the internet, not just Wikipedia, and tend to question ALL my web resources.