Wikipedia a recognized source?

It’s the same at every school and in academia. It’s not a reliable source even if it is easy to reference. You will get your ass handed to you if you use it seriously.

At TempleU my professors frequently discourage the use of Wikipedia.. but yea, I usually use it as a starting point.

Id say that that is policy everywhere. My teachers say that I can use It as a jumping off point, but if its cited then the whole paper Is trash to them.

One of my teachers took a student’s paper that would have easily been an “A” and tore it up in front of the class because of the wikipedia citing. A little extreme, but he proved his point.

Thanks guys. That pretty much settles my curiosity on the subject :)
At least our lecturers were good enough to mention it up front. Don’t think any of the students made the mistake if using it.

My profs seem to be in the same boat as Eambos’ are. If you know nothing about the subject, Wikipedia does a fair job of giving you the overview of the topic. However, if you want the real concepts and authentic sources – you’ll need to utilise academic articles and such. (EBSCO, LexisNexis, JSTOR are all great tools to use when researching)

It’s not just Wikipedia. Professors discourage the use of reference encyclopedia in general, as you are discouraged from using secondary sources that simply summarize. Wikipedia itself isn’t particularly better or worse than any other encyclopedia as long as you take care to look at the history before judging the content. There was a study done a year or so ago that found more factual errors in Britannica than Wikipedia.

(Disclaimer – I often contribute to Wikipedia articles)

From what i’ve seen it’s really a love-hate kinda thing. People either swear by it or condemn it. I understand there reasoning, being so open source and all, but the moderation staff does a really good job keeping up with problems. Surveys in past years have shown Wikipedia to have the same percentage of error as any library encyclopedia, but skeptics will be skeptics.

Someone put up an article about my great grandfather on the site, and although it has errors, I appreciate the efforts made and he would just about slipped into oblivion, had people not made the effort. When I noted the errors to them and sent back-up, they corrected them immediately. Unfortunately, someone from the school that is named after him (a staff member, I assume faculty) copied the first version. It is a great starting place, has amazing information, but should always be double checked. I think it is a plus rather than a minus, but students should be encouraged and required to expand from there.

If the question is whether the wikipedia is a recognised source the answer is definitely no. Recognition or otherwise depends upon the policies adopted by the academia and that is hardly relevant. What is more important is that the wikipedia definitely serves an important purpose in that it encourages amateur codification of knowledge which may not stand the rigor of academic discipline .It is more importantly one more step in “crowd sourcing”, adding to the sum total of codified human knowledge and to this extent is an important milestone in the evolution of human thought.