It always kind of bothers me when I hear people say something along the lines of “Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source of information”. Not only does this sort of idea come up online and in pop culture, but many universities around the world don’t allow the citation of Wikipedia for academic work. A lot of people believe that this is simply because “anybody can edit a Wikipedia article”, but this isn’t really the case at all. Now whilst there are valid reasons for disallowing the usage of Wikipedia in academic work, the general rhetoric that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source of information displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how an open source model operates.

First the idea that “anybody can edit a Wikipedia article” is misleading. Whilst misinformation can appear on Wikipedia, it usually only does on controversial articles, which through strict community moderation and page history keep these occurances quite rare. If you were let’s say viewing the article on Donald Trump during the 2016 election then maybe there might be a few things in there which shouldn’t be, but if you’re just reading general articles on topics such as photosynthesis or the telescope, chances are everything in there is going to be accurate.

Another gripe some people seem to have with Wikipedia is how it’s dynamically sourced, implying that as an article get modified the citations you refer to in your work might be altered or deleted entirely. This doesn’t make any sense however as permanent links allow users to create links to specific versions of an article unaffected by any future edits.

Research in academia is meant to challenge your understanding of various sources of information and effectively apply any relevant information you’ve obtained to arrive at your own theories and conclusions. Articles on Wikipedia pretty much do this all for you, which is a large reason behind why you aren’t allowed to cite Wikipedia, or any other encyclopaedias for that matter, in academic work.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’re conducting some sort of ground breaking research at a top university chances are your professor isn’t going to be too happy to find out that your research consisted of a couple Wikipedia articles and something you read on Twitter, but for almost everything else Wikipedia is more than enough.