Questions, Questions, and More Questions….?

Liam Justiniano

Who Are Our Peers?

Being an English-major and just someone who enjoys random deep dives for information I thought that I knew more than my fair-share about peer-reviewed journals and academic journals. After reading Mike Caufield’s Verified on peer-reviewed journals I realized how much more there is to know. I never knew that peer-reviewed articles were not in fact reviewed by some elected board of academics, rather those journals and articles are reviewed by a board of volunteers. Reading through these chapters I realized how flawed the peer-review process can be. However, it’s also clear that yes, this is the best we can do at the current moment with what we have. This makes me want to be even more careful with the journals and articles that I use. Further encouraging me to continue to read into the articles and not just trust them because they are “peer-reviewed”. 

Wikipedia Revival? 

I had a similar experience reading Caufield’s view on Wikipedia. I grew up hearing never to trust Wikipedia and I understood why when they explained it. However, whenever I would still continue to use Wikipedia of course, I couldn’t quite find all the issues that they had mentioned.  I think by the time I was truly reading Wikipedia articles they had gone through the process of cleaning it up. Wikipedia had many safeguards in place so that random edits and trolls cannot mess with the site or at least nothing they mess with sticks. It’s interesting to see as a new wave of mistrust and misinformation that Wikipedia is making a comeback. I’ve personally seen a lot more people using it as a reference page or just for quick fact-checking in debates.  I mostly use Wikipedia for its references though, which is something else [name] mentions that as a tertiary source Wikipedia should be mostly used for. 

So what can you really trust online?

It’s very interesting to see how unreliable items and resources that I thought were extremely reliable and inversely how reliable some previously thought unreliable sources are. It really just concretes the fact that you really have to analyze and look into everything that you are wanting to use. You can’t be suspicious and untrusting of everything, but everything needs to be questioned. As a good academic it is important to continue to do research past just the surface level. Yes, questioning authors and sources and fact-checking those facts is important. However, questioning the institutions and the processes behind those sources and the databases and websites that you find the sources on. Questioning how the articles you read are selected to appear higher up on the page. Questioning why and how these articles were published. It’s a very interesting issue that is being revealed to me. It’s something that seems so simple, of course you have to question the sources, but just how much I should really be going through and questioning the articles is new and kinda exciting to me.