The using of Wikipedia among college students

Last week, we had a seminar about "How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research" written by Alison J. Head and Micheal B. Eisenberg.

From the seminar, we learned that 70 percent of students that were interviewed used Wikipedia in the beginning of their course-related researches in order to get general ideas. On the contrary, rare students ended their coursework with Wikipedia because of the lack of academic. These can explain why Wikipedia is a great place to start, but a horrible place to end.

As for me, I haven't used Wikipedia before, but I usually got ideas from BaiduPedia that is similar to Wikipedia. I used BaiduPedia because it provided me many different aspects of the research. Because both Wikipedia and BaiduPedia can be edited by all users, the knowledge mentioned is common and general. To college students, Wikipedia is not good enough to cite in their course-related researches.

Thing 9: Identifying my need---Chang

Chang's topic of INF6350 assignment is "How did the Internet affect students' information seeking behaviour?". Nowadays, it is an important way to seek information from the Internet such as digital libraries and Google Schoolar. As a result, students' information seeking behaviour have been affected by the Internet. Based on this situation, my essay will focus on the changes of college students' behaviour affected by the Internet.

Week 3: Google or database searching --- Chang

In the last two weeks, we have learn Google and Database from Alastair. Today I am going to share one tip about Google and Database searching with you. In the second session, Alastair showed us a useful tool called Thumbshots Ranking which can compare site ranking in different seach tools such as Google, Yahoo and Being. The results are interesting. When we search a same keyword in Google and Yahoo, the ranking of results is completely different between these two popular search engines. After that, we changed the sequence of the keywords and searched again in the same search tools. We found that the rankings were totally different. This meant the sequence of key words had impact on the ranking. When I went home, I wanted to find if the plural of noun could affect the result of ranking. I tried the keyword Car and Cars in Google and found that the plural could also affect the result of ranking. But unlike changing sequence, the plural only affected the part of the result. From these there different types of seaching, we found that one interesting thing was Wikipedia always occurred in the top of the first page.

From this experience, I learn that I need to try different search strategies when searching information.

Thing 5: The New Information Universe ---Chang

Recently I had an experience to find an authentic Chinese restaurant in Sheffield. Because I never had meal in a Chinese restaurant of Sheffield before, I had to find some information on the Internet.

Firstly, I posted a question about the good Chinese restaurants to the internet forum of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association in Sheffield. Later, someone recommended a restaurant called Wong Ting to me. But I didn’t know if this restaurant was his personal preference. So I had to find some common evaluation about this restaurant.

Next, I used Google to find some common evaluation about these restaurants. First of all, I typed the text ‘ ”evaluation” “Chinese restaurant” “Sheffield” ’ into the search box and the results were some PDFS about Chinese restaurants in Sheffield which were not what I wanted. Then I removed the words ‘Chinese’ and ‘Sheffield’, added the word ‘UK’ into the search box and searched again. This time, I found a website called Tripadvisor. After finding out Tripadvisor, I searched Wong Ting Restaurant in its database and there were more than 60 comments written by customers.

Finally, I decided to have dinner in the Wong Ting Restaurant after reading all the comments. And the foods were delicious.