Assignment: Comparison of articles from Wikipedia and Gale Virtual Reference database.
Find two articles on your proposed topic (or what you’re considering at this point), one on Wikipedia and the other on the database Gale Virtual Reference Library. Read both articles carefully and note the differences in the scope, style, tone, information, audience, and citations provided. Your comparison should cover each reference article and explain what’s similar and different about them. It should introduce them both and argue which you think is more accurate and informative and state why. If certain parts of one article are particularly interesting or useful but it’s generally not the better of the two, don’t hesitate to say so.
Process: read both articles and annotate them (you can do so with the “Hypothesis” plug-in or by printing them out). You might use a Venn diagram, chart, or another visual representation of the information you are comparing.
Your comparison will be evaluated on the clear and accurate representation of each article, the introduction to your topic and the sources, your argument for why one is better or more useful than the other (or you could argue they serve different rhetorical purposes), and the conclusion of your analysis.
Note that when you’re covering an article from Gale Virtual Reference it’s coming from a reference source indexed on this database. I.e., you won’t name Gale Virtual Reference as a source, it will be one like The Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society or Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, etc.
Length: 300-400 words
APA or MLA style.
Include a References page / section.
*Also include a list of keywords and terms you will use in your research for this project.
How to cite Wikipeida in APA (from OWL):
Wikipedia Article
APA 7 treats Wikipedia articles as special instances of entries in reference works. Thus, there are a few differences between reference entries for pages on Wikipedia and those for generic webpages.
Title of article. (Year, Month Date). In Wikipedia. URL of archived version of page
Quantum mechanics. (2019, November 19). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quantum_mechanics&oldid=948476810
Wikipedia articles often update frequently. For this reason, the date refers to the date that the cited version of the page was published. Note also that the manual recommends linking to the archived version of the page, rather than the current version of the page on the site, since the latter can change over time. Access the archived version by clicking “View History,” then clicking the date/timestamp of the version you’d like to cite
