Use Wikipedia to Find Sources for Research

No matter what teachers and others think about the accuracy and reliability of Wikipedia, most agree that it's a good launching pad for finding more solid sources for your research.

"Did you know that Google Books, Web Archive and BBC are three most commonly used sources on Wikipedia?" In July 2012, WebEmpires.org “crawled the entire database of English Wikipedia to compile a list of Wikipedia’s top sources. The result – a list over 2 million websites, ranked by number of Wikipedia’s pages referencing to the source. You can find the entire list here: http://webempires.org/wikirank/top/." And the image above shows Wikipedia’s Top 50 websites.

Notice how many News Magazines are used by Wikipedia's contributors (about 1/3 of all the sources used). It stands to reason that you if you are looking for magazine articles, checking the sources listed at the bottom of an article related to your question or inquiry topic might be a useful habit to develop. By following the links on a Wikipedia page, you'll also find government statistics, book sources, videos, and links to archived websites.

Try this!

1. Before you do this mission, do the mission Wikipedia: A good starting point.

Read and annotate a wikipedia article that sheds light on your inquiry questions, then write a response in which you quote from other sources that either support what is said in Wikipedia or question something published there.

2. Look at the References, External Links, and Further Reading sections at the bottom of most Wikipedia articles.

• If items have links, follow those until you find two or three complex, thought-provoking, peer-reviewed, well-documented articles that you can use in your research.
• Some items are not linked, but you can still find them by searching on Google or by asking for help to find them from a libriarian or your teacher.

3 Go for it, but be picky. Choose articles that look well-researched (They have long bibliographies), peer-reviewed (They come from a journal), and complex (You’ll have to really work at understanding it, looking up some words, asking questions). And most important choose two or three articles that seem to have a different perspectives on your topic. Find something that challenges your view, something that isn’t the common, mainstream answers to your inquiry question. Find articles that are interesting -- but also ones that you can digest, given your reading level and your level of passion for this topic.

4. Once you’ve found an article that you think will be interesting and will stretch your thinking a bit, download it to your desktop, then add it to a Personal Crocodoc account. If you don’t have one yet, now would be a good time to Sign up at personal.crocodoc.com. It’s a free service for individual users like us. There’s a lot more you can do later with sharing folders with your teachers and your peers--and putting a link to your current research project in your profile... but for now, let’s just get 2 or 3 articles up in your account, so that you can start annotating them online. You might have to turn an article into a PDF first. If you are using Chrome for your browser, the Chrome extension "Print Friendly & PDF" is an excellent tool for creating PDFs from Web pages. You might also paste an article into a Google Document and add comments for your annotations.

5. That’s almost it. Oh, a couple of more things. After you’ve annotated an article or perhaps when you're still reading, add new vocabulary words to a flashcard set at quizlet.com. And finally when you've finished reading an article add transcriptions and reactions to the important parts on a Dialectical Notes form. There’s a Google Template with instructions for what to do in the Guides or you can go to youthvoices.net/dialecticalnotes.

6. Have fun struggling with the fascinating studies, reports, and articles that you find in the References, External Links and Further Reading sections at the bottom of Wikipedia pages.