User blog comment:Yyp/New Wikia Skin:What we can expect?/@comment-1429792-20101004220801/@comment-1454424-20101005062903

That's not it. People tell students not to use Wikipedia and Wikis for school/college assignments because they are too frigging lazy to teach their students proper information literacy.

For example, say you looked-up the article on wikipedia:Information_model:Information model. You can see that the definition of "Information model" has a citation to "Y. Tina Lee (1999). "Information modeling from design to implementation" National Institute of Standards and Technology.". At this point, you should go check the citation out AND if you were to use that particular definition in your assignment, you should reference Y.Tina Lee and not Wikipedia because Y.Tina Lee is the original source. However, there is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia has a starting point.

Now if you find something on Wikipedia that has no citation, it's best to back away slowly or try and get some sort of verification from somewhere else. Same goes for here, most of the stuff we have is reference and if you were to use something from there in your assignment, you should trace back to the original chapter/episode for the citation. Not the wiki article itself.

The only time that you reference the wiki article itself is when you are directing someone somewhere for "more information" on say a game. For example, I used to teach "Computer Game Studies" to first year university students. Their assignments had a lot of reference to games. When the mentioned a game for the first time, they had to provide a reference for the game. I didn't really care if they referenced the wikipedia article on the game or the game's official website. Most of the time, if I was unfamiliar with the game and wanted to learn more, I went to wikipedia anyway.

So short answer to a long question, you can use wikipedia as a starting point but you must check citation. But then again, you should check citation in academic papers, news reports and pretty much everything to make sure you are actually getting reliable information. I mean, the so called "reputable sources" too often get caught printing absolute garbage.