[longtimelistnr]

The reason is that it is not a direct source of course because the authors cannot be validated. Never met a college professor that said don’t use Wikipedia (if anything it was encouraged) as long as you’re pulling from the citations. I had plenty of high school teachers talk about how awful it is though and I think it was because they just didn’t understand it

[comfypotato]

I'll take this a step further to say that my graduate algorithms professor assigned Wikipedia articles as reading. The parent blanket statements are just that: overgeneralizations.

[fedorareis]

I had a similar experience. My cryptography professor regularly linked to Wikipedia articles in his assignments as the reading to go with the assignment. Honestly, the last time I had a teacher really say something against using Wikipedia was in high school.

[thayne]

My undergrad physics professors didn't exactly assign wikipedia articles, but they did tell us that some articles were useful resources for understanding certain topics. In my experience, the more technical a topic, the more likely the wikipedia article is to be reliable. Probably because there isn't much incentive for someone who isn't an expert to edit it.