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PolyU Library

Online Tools for Assignment

Introduce useful online tools that may help to prepare your assignment.

Wikipedia


Wikipedia is a user-friendly online tool to let us quickly gain a board overview on a topic. You can easily find information on many latest topics that may or may not be available on other reference sources and encyclopedias.

However, using Wikipedia for academic assignments can be controversial. It is because Wikipedia is a wiki, which means anyone and everyone can edit, delete accurate information or add false information on it. This makes the contents in Wikipedia relatively less reliable when compared to traditional reference sources like encyclopedias. As a result, most academic staff do not wish that you cite Wikipedia sources in your assignment. Having said that, Wikipedia still has its value. You can gain some quick information on a topic, pick up crucial keywords and terminologies so that you can use them to further your research in other sources.

In case you would like to cite any information from Wikipedia, you should do a fact check - verifying the information from the sources cited in the references section of Wikipedia, and cite the original sources instead of citing Wikipedia in your assignment. You may read further advice from this article.

Also another useful tip: check the revision history of a Wikipedia page by clicking on View history button next to the search box on top of the page.


Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.