Scientology! What a controversial and unknown topic we finally chose. After having several choices shot down by our esteemed professor, we settled on Scientology, (mainly because medical marijuana was already taken and we couldn't do a profile on a person). As we soon discovered, Scientology is a "religion" that is much disputed and has many core enthusiasts as well as many disbelievers.
We first looked at the site and discovered that there were 266 sources listed and we agreed to each take 50 to research individually and divide the remainder later. Although we didn't discuss in detail what each would do, we all basically did the same thing, which was to click on each source, follow the link, read what the source had to say, decide on validity and whether it was biased, and create a list to count how many came from each place. I was assigned # 200-250, which were mostly newspaper articles, some essays written by acknowledged followers of the religion, and journal entries found in the Marburg Journal of Religion. Several were foreign news reports, where Scientology gained some notoriety in other countries like Australia and England, but most were based here in the United States. We noticed that a disproportionate amount of newspapers were local to where Scientology had a large base, and were reporting on controversies that were local and sometimes took a very biased view against Scientology. There were also some news clips from the main networks affiliates, NBC, as well as online news like CNET, that reported on the questionable circumstances when a member died in the care of Scientologists and the court battle and undisclosed settlement reached after court had began. I also learned that Scientologists are not afraid to sue for any press that they feel in inflammatory or negative, and they seem to have buckets of money to support their litigations. We also looked at information that was omitted and tried to figure out why it was omitted.
The girls and I met at Livingston Campus Center on Saturday to compare and collate our independent research and do the PowerPoint presentation. During that meeting, we realize that our sources were limited, with only 24 main references of which 13 were unreliable due to the author's bias. We also discovered that there was a Wikiprojects page, which was created as a way to show Scientology in a positive light, and we felt that in itself made the whole entry biased towards Scientology. Also, the Scientology entry has restricted editing features but that could be due to vandalism as well as the desire of those people who choose to portray Scientology only positively.
All in all, we decided that the Scientology site on Wikipedia is a biased site based on the limited amount of prejudicial primary sources. Although it was informative on the the basic overview and beliefs of the church, it minimized the negative aspects of some of those same beliefs. When investigated, sources that are not scholarly should not be anyone's primary source for their own research but can be used as a general overview of a topic. This entry in Wiki was clearly not a scholarly source but rather an opportunity for some members to present their information in a convincing way.
By doing this project, I am reminded that this has potential effects on the American way of researching and receiving information. Many students use Wikipedia as their primary source, often not going further to investigate the sources of the entry. The assumption of truthfulness and validity that encyclopedias inherently have is not the same for Wikipedia. Due to the very nature of Wikipedia, it is a source that should always be looked upon as suspect. It is the easiest research for students and is depended on because of its simplicity. Because technology has so infiltrated how research is done today, false or misleading articles can be cited as truth, and the bad information is confused with the good. I think that Wikipedia shouldn't be ever used as a primary source but can be a good place to start to learn about topics. Even using their sources offers potential good primary sources that can lead to a more true paper that would be respected as scholarly.
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