Category Archives: research

Is Wikipedia reliable for research? The best way to use it

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

Everyone needs to find information for some purpose. Therefore, everyone does research. This post, however, specifically means research students do for some kind of paper. What role can Wikipedia play in research from elementary school to doctoral dissertations? Some people seem to think that research means looking at Wikipedia articles. Including people who should know better. In 2016, Apple hired Ruslan Salakhutdinov as its first Director of Artificial Intelligence. One announcement quoted him as saying, “We’re working on the idea of trying to use external knowledge bases, If I ask you something about a particular thing, can your system basically go to Wikipedia, read a few different articles, learn some facts about the world, and provide you with the right answer?” Wouldn’t it be more useful for an artificial intelligence program to extract information from professional literature?

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Everyone does research: how to do it well

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

A friend of mine always asks if I’m behaving, and I always say yes. Whether I’m behaving well or badly is another question. Everyone does research. You do research. Do you do it well or badly? Research comes in all shapes and sizes. Take medical research, for example. Some people work to discover new drugs. Anyone can see that’s research. Doctors read all kinds of information about drugs to know which ones to prescribe for your condition. They might not think of it as research, but it is. You get your medicine and want to know something more than what’s in the documents the pharmacist gave you. So you look at some web sites to find out more about it. That’s research, too.

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What happens when you need to look it up?

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

I wrote this post for anyone who doesn’t know everything off the top of their head. You have to look things up from time to time, don’t you? Once upon a time, we all looked up addresses and phone numbers in a phone book. We probably all still have them. You can still use print to find a wide variety of information, but nowadays, you most likely look things up online more often. What happens between you typing your search query and the results appearing on the screen?

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Happy birthday, Wikipedia

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

  Wikipedia just passed its 15th birthday. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what online information and online research were like before it burst on the scene. It is one of the first and by far the largest ventures in user-written content. It is not, I repeat, not an authoritative source of information suitable for student papers or other serious research—unless perhaps it is the only available source. But that’s not because Wikipedia is created by volunteers instead of recognized experts. It’s because it’s an encyclopedia.

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Victory for Google Books, larger victory for the public

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Have any of your Google searches turned up pages from a book? Google began to experiment with scanning books in 2002 and announced plans to establish a digital library, now known as Google Books, in 2004. The project quickly became mired in controversy as the Authors Guild, some individual authors, and several major publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently upheld a 2013 district court ruling on Authors Guild v. Google that Google’s activities constitute fair use under copyright law. The Authors Guild plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

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