Friday, May 19, 2006

Using the Internets for Research, or How Not to Be an Idiot

"What did Betsy ross do during the war? Nothing tells me this. i need to know that great thing she did, and if i dont figure it out, i could get a bad grade. so, please, find out and put it on this website. I need it for a project by the end of this week. which is a short time. plus i have a math test on thursday. so cant go on the website then. i kind of need it now. Byee and Good luck!!!!!"

That was written on a discussion page at Wikipedia. I can only hope a college student didn’t write it. It’s bad enough that anyone would write it. However, not wanting to do schoolwork certainly isn’t new. We all tried to get out of it, especially in high school. No, that’s not the problem. This comment is representative of a larger issue facing academia: nobody knows how to do research anymore.

Thus, I have written the following guidelines for anyone wishing to conduct research here on the Internets. Happy researching!

1. Use Wikipedia discriminately. Read the discussion pages to see if there are any disagreements about what is written. Remember that people like you wrote the articles. Would you trust yourself?

2. Don’t use webpages if you don’t know who created them and what the creators’ biases are. For instance, if you go to Daily Kos, don’t expect to find all sides to an argument. Same thing for Red State. Find out why the sites exist. If you think a site is completely unbiased, you’re probably quite dense.

3. Don’t rely completely on Google. Come on. This is as bad as writing a comment on Wikipedia asking other people to do your research for you. Dig a little.

4. Leave. Get off the computer. Go to the library. Find something that you can hold in your hands. Wander through the stacks. Read old newspapers and magazines. Talk to a librarian. If you think you can find all the information you need while sitting in front of your computer, then you are helping to bring down our nation’s level of intelligence. Don’t do that.

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