Most students use Wikipedia, but there has been quite a backlash against it from academics. Here’s what a student needs to know.

1. Everybody uses Wikipedia all the time, including lecturers. It’s a great place to get an overview of a field, and it’s usually accurate, detailed, and up-to-date.
2. It’s not a peer-reviewed academic publication, so you really can’t cite it in your essays (Middlebury College actually banned citation of Wikipedia). But you really can’t go citing a printed encyclopedia either, or a dictionary, magazine, newspaper, press release, or blog. Read actual journal articles and books; you’re at university now.
3. Wikipedia’s policy is that all articles should cite other publications, and the reference list can be a great starting point for your own research. As Catherine Pellegrino nicely points out, Wikipedia aims to document every entry with reliable sources, the same sources lecturers want you to use.
4. Copy-pasting bits of Wikipedia into your assignments is bit stupid.

Many tech-savvy folks think that banning all citations of Wikipedia is silly. Alan Liu at UC Santa Barbara has a good policy which allows for citing Wikipedia “when the point being supported is minor, non-controversial, or also supported by other evidence.” But students who cite Wikipedia need to understand how to read discussion pages and history, how to judge the reliability of a page, and how to cite the exact version of the page they looked at. One of the best guides for students on how to use Wikipedia can be found at (no surprise) Wikipedia.

The Google Books project involved spending $300 million to scan 10 million books and make them available on the Web. This immediately caused legal strife with authors and publishers, but a settlement has been reached (at least in the USA). Robert Darnton in a NY Review article gives one perspective on the settlement, Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic another.

Legal issues aside, Google Books is enormously useful, especially if you study work in the public domain: up to the 19th and early 20th century. The fully searchable texts of numerous books are easily available, and they’re actual digitised text, not just scans of the pages. This enables you to do things a library simply can’t—for example, a student had a query about a law essay they were writing, which included a quote from someone called Bagehot about the “appendages of monarchy”. Searching for “appendages of monarchy bagehot” in Google Books takes you to page 315 of The English Constitution, which you can freely read online.

Not just read—you can quote it too. The toolbar in page view has a Plain Text option, where you can switch from scanned text to plain text, ready for copying and pasting.You can download pages, as PDFs or in the EPub format for e-book readers. And there’s also a Clip button, which lets you drag over the page to create, in effect, a screenshot. Google Books gives you an web address for that particular screenshot, and even a link you can paste into your blog that will display the snippet. Here’s a New Zealand reference from Darwin’s book The Formation of Vegetable Mould by the Actions of Worms:

Wikipedia claims to be a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And that’s exactly what it is. Its name comes from the Hawai‘ian wiki, or quick: a wiki is any collaborative, easily-edited web page. You hear people using Wiki as a nickname for Wikipedia, but that’s not really correct: the foundation that runs it also hosts its siblings Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and so on.

Wikipedia was only set up in 2001, but now has over 3 million articles, all written by unpaid volunteers. It’s startlingly comprehensive, if not always well written. It reflects its geeky origins: 11,697 words on Gondor, compared with 6,751 on Ghana. And it seems to have dealt a death blow to the traditional printed encyclopedia. What might be the project, in its infancy today, that will have transformed the way we do research in another eight years?

A good introduction is the history of Wikipedia in the Sept 2006 Atlantic Monthly, which prompted a personal testimonial from Nicholson Baker, in which he reveals himself to be an ardent inclusionist. The inclusionist/deletionist split is a major philosophical conflict in Wikipedia, between those who demand that article subjects be “noteworthy” (which in practice means cited in the mainstream media) and others who believe there’s room in Wikipedia for almost anything; inclusionists like Baker scour the list of articles marked for deletion and add citations to try to save them.

People are always amazed that they or anyone else can click on a Wikipedia page and change the content, and I have to reassure them that it’s legal—indeed, encouraged. They always then ask why the pages aren’t full of digital graffiti and silliness. To see how Wikipedia protects itself, look at the History pages for a typical article: on Baldwin Street, the steepest street in Dunedin and likely the world. On July 20, 2009, an anonymous visitor clicked on Edit and cautiously added an ungrammatical The to the beginning of one section. They clicked save and were no doubt amazed to see their changes appear in the entry. Emboldened, they changed The to penis. Hilarity doubtless ensued. Until, less than a minute later, a piece of software called ClueBot sniffed out the offending word and politely reverted all their edits. Undeterred, the vandals typed in the word JOSH. A minute later, this was deleted by a human being, username Vicenarian (American, male, 24, Unitarian according to his user page). BEN ROX UR JOX typed the vandals. Vicenarian deleted it. The vandals responded with a half-hearted from ben & josh. This was deleted by user Snigbrook (from Lancashire, supports the Blackburn Rovers) a few seconds later. No response. Ban and Josh had no doubt quit in disgust. The entire episode lasted seven minutes.

That’s how vandalism is taken care of. Wikipedia sceptics are also suspicious of the accuracy of the content, though. How can we be sure the information is accurate? Well, as Professor Peter Murray-Rust puts it, “the bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.” There are plenty of experts adding and editing content, and the sheer weight of numbers seems to make articles gradually converge on accuracy. Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it’s absolutely up to date, and errors can be easily corrected, neither of which are true of textbooks or encyclopedias. It’s possible for inaccuracies to sneak in, especially if people start editing their own page to minimise their alleged naughtiness, as Richard Worth did earlier this year. Sadly he did so under a fairly recognisable login name, and was shamed in the media for it.

• An interview with one of the early Wikipedians
• Students surveyed on how they used Wikipedia (YouTube video)
• The official Policies and Guidelines of Wikipedia, to counter any suspicion that anarchy prevails
• A list of fifty fascinating Wikipedia articles, and fifty more, to give you an idea of its scope
• A recent report suggests the explosive growth of Wikipedia is slowing, and editing of what’s already there is becoming more important: here’s a summary, and an older analysis of who actually writes Wikipedia.
• A nice short think piece by Cory Doctorow.

Quote marks search for an exact phrase:

“audacity of hope”

Find the local time anywhere:

what time is it
time in moscow

Or what’s on at the movies:

movies in Hamilton

Use the wisdom of the internet with Better than, Sounds like, Sucks searches:

“better than microsoft word”
“sounds like pearl jam”
“firefox sucks”

Find related terms with a tilde (~):

“~butternut squash”

Exclude a word from your search:

paris malls -hilton

So synonyms are a combination:

~lobster -lobster

Google search can be a calculator too:

pi*(44.5^2)
speed of light/square root 3

Include a range of numbers in your search:

“john cage” 1940...1945
ipod 30...40 gb

Get a definition for anything:

define:tangent

Convert temperature, currency, mileage:

35 USD in NZD
250 F to C
35 mpg to km/l
half a cup in ml

Restrict your search to particular sites:

climate change site:ac.nz
mandolin site:www.tvnz.co.nz

Find pages that link to a page:

link:http://www.learningskills.canterbury.ac.nz

Looking for free stuff finds junk unless you restrict it to a reliable site:

site:stumbleupon.com free “word templates”
site:delicious.com free “map clip art”

Identify people’s genders, things, words with image searches:

image search > Priti
image search > pediment
image search > pilcrow

Restrict searches to people’s faces with the &imgtype=face parameter:

rose&imgtype=face

Find only particular file types:

“copyright clearance” filetype:pdf site:ac.nz

Plenty more useful tips at Google.