cryptids await you

i wish you could know me

Sarah Morgan

'Is it raining where you are? '

The video opens a door to an outside industrial plant-like area. Snow is on the ground and there is otherwise some miscellaneous noise of factory work going on.

Then the person behind the camera lets off an “OooOOO AH AH” ie the typical monkey sound.

They actively told us to use Wikipedia to learn things but still wouldn’t let us use it for papers.

Most of what we do is show them how to use the university’s fabulous library database SuperSearch. Also, subject guides curated by our librarians. (I’ve been lucky enough to have our department’s librarian create a subject guide specifically for my course, which is the coolest thing ever—in my opinion. The freshman rarely appreciate its merit lol.)

My favorite method re: the library SuperSearch is to have them to find one recently published academic article relevant to their research interests, and then to pillage its bibliography for additional, even more relevant sources, and so on until they’ve triangulated the most crucial recent scholarship related to the topic they are researching.

But I also give them this article about using Wikipedia, and it’s frequently the most appreciated and discussed reading of the semester. Go figure!

The reasons Wikipedia can't be cited is because it's editable and anonymous.

To cite something, it needs to be permanent and, in most cases, openly authored.

Openly authored, because the author's professional reputation and credentials are important information for the reader(s) to judge the trustworthiness of the source.

(If someone writes sixty papers and then is busted for making shit up, that sheds important light on the potential truth-value of everything attributed to them.)

Permanent, because the cited work has to stay on the record as is for people to be able to reference the citation.

(If you read a paper that cites Dr. Parsnip Jones as saying one thing in his 1863 treatise, and it uses him to back up its point, and you go read that 1863 treatise and it turns out he said the opposite, you've just uncovered a massive flaw in the paper that can call its conclusions into question, along with that of any derivative work.)

Wikipedia is edited by anonymous users and the previous versions are removed. That means if you use it, and somebody changes it, your source no longer says what it used to say when you cited it, and therefore is invalid.