Most Interesting Thing Learned While Researching

One of the most interesting and possibly best things I have found while doing my research for this project, is the correct way to use Wikipedia. I personally love Wikipedia, and I get a lot of my general knowledge from the site. So when teachers assign work and tell us not to use Wikipedia for our research, it's kind of a bummer. But, I fully understand why most teachers do not allow the site as an appropriate research tool. Wikipedia's information can be manipulated by any of its users and therefore can be unreliable. So when I was doing my research for how to research on the internet, I came across some useful tips when trying to figure out how and when to use Wikipedia. This new method of doing research on Wikipedia allows me to use the information that I find from the site, just in a different way.

To use Wikipedia correctly, one tip that I found was to use it kind of as the search engine. When reading a Wikipedia page, and you come across information that would be helpful or useful to use in your assignment, the best thing to do is to click on the footnote. By clicking on the footnote it will take you to the citation from where that piece of information was originally found. That source may be a book, magazine, or online site. So if it was an online article, you can just click on the source and it should take you to the original site of the information. This method will work almost all of the time because if the information on the Wikipedia page is not cited, then there will be caution headings at the top of the page. This method of using Wikipedia for research is really simple, and even though it has always been right in front of me, I have never thought about using it before.

From now on, when I have to do research for an assignment, which I am not allowed to use Wikipedia on, I will be able to still use Wikipedia in a sense. Sometimes, good factual information can be hard to come by, but now, most of the information that is on Wikipedia will also be available to use. Once again, this may not sound like the biggest discovery to most, considering a lot of people probably already knew about doing this, but to me, it will help a lot in my future research.