Students often love to use Wikipedia for school projects, but teachers often ban the use of the website. WTV’s Josie Woodward has the story.

When researching for a project, the first website many students visit is Wikipedia. However, teachers warn against a reliance on Wikipedia in school work.

“I think that if you’re looking for just an easy quick answer you could probably use Wikipedia but if you were looking for something for research or for school I wouldn’t use it because anybody can change the answers,” social studies teacher Jennifer Nelken. 

For many students, Wikipedia is a good source for basic information.

“I think that if you’re looking for just an easy quick answer you could probably use Wikipedia,” freshman McKenzie Ohlmann. “But if you were looking for something for research or for school I wouldn’t use it because anybody can change the answers.”

School librarian Jeana Chetty acknowledges that Wikipedia has its place, but warns against overuse of the site.

“The school doesn’t have a policy per se on Wikipedia, but there is kind of an unwritten rule that if you’re writing a research paper, you wouldn’t use Wikipedia,” Chetty said. “You can use Wikipedia if you wanna know for your own knowledge who Andrew Jackson is. Well that’s fine. Just look up Andrew Jackson Wikipedia’ll be the first one up there. That’s perfect to just find out about Andrew Jackson.If you’re writing a research paper for school, your teacher doesn’t want Wikipedia as one of your sources. You can start at Wikipedia for you to ask bigger questions if you don’t know your subject but in general you’re gonna avoid Wikipedia in a school research project.”