[siva7]

Wikipedia is not a primary source. Students can cite the original source but not wikipedia itself. The university departments i'm aware of still don't allow citing wikipedia and explicitly cover it as bad style. And i have to agree with the professors there. The quality is plain bad, last time i checked a medical article on wikipedia it was full off of claims without citations and those claims contradicted official medical guidelines. If i would receive a academic home assignment without citations the student would have failed the course, so why should it be OK on wikipedia.

[pdpi]

> The university departments i'm aware of still don't allow citing wikipedia and explicitly cover it as bad style.

It's worth noting that Wikipedia is not special in this regard — those same departments probably also consider it bad style to cite Britannica (and, if they don't, they should).

Encyclopaedias are meant to be starting points for research, not the ultimate destination. Editors, both of Wikipedia and otherwise, are not expected to be subject matter experts, which is why the guidance on Wikipedia is that you're not even supposed to use primary sources as reference, but rather secondary sources[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

[jacobolus]

If students would always look carefully and critically at the relevant sources Wikipedia cites, assess their authors’ biases, compare multiple sources, etc., before ultimately picking what to cite, that would be one thing.

But what happens instead (in people’s published journal papers! not to mention news articles, etc.) is authors lazily crib material from Wikipedia and then either cite nothing or randomly pick works from among Wikipedia’s sources to cite without ever looking at them.

If you are writing a paper you should cite where you got the information. If the only place you looked was Wikipedia, that’s not great research practice but you should still cite Wikipedia. Honesty is an even more important part of scholarship than diligence.