SEARCHING WITH WIKIPEDIAMSVU Library Online Tutorials

What is Wikipedia?•An online encyclopedia that allows anyone to create or edit articles.

What will you find?•Encyclopedia-style entries and information.

•Contains just the facts on a topic, not scholarly writing or original research.

Pros•Can be a great place to do

background research on a topic.

• If you see incorrect information, you may edit it yourself.

Cons•User-edited, meaning information

may not always be accurate .

•Especially important to be critical and verify any facts.

Other tips•Simple to search – just look up a topic to find the entry.

•Citations are located at the bottom of each article, look at these to judge the credibility of information.

Best results when searching for a topic rather than research on a topic.

No results returned for original search – this does not mean that there is no

information available on this topic.

There may be relevant information included in

one of these results, so it is a good idea to browse through these articles.

Wikipedia articles are all laid out the same: the title and a short introduction are at the top of the page.

A table of contents is located a bit further down the page. Items can be clicked if you would like to jump to a specific section. On the right there is

usually a box with an image and some key facts about the topic.

Articles usually have links to other articles right in the text.

The small numbers beside different parts of the text

correspond to the references.

References are located at the bottom of each article. The

numbers match those found in the text. You can use these titles

to do a search in a database.