Wikipedia has grown to an amazing size over the past years, and it is now the 4th most visited site in the world! Wikipedia is a great source of information and for may quick asnwers to questions you may have about a person or event in history, but when used out of context or as a scholarly source for a research paper, it is not trustworthy enough.
Wikipedia is a non-profit site that anyone can edit the pages. It has become more trustworthy in recent years, but there are still many mistakes throughout the website. For students writing papers the biggest reasons it is not a good souce are…
- anyone can edit pages
- its an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias are not good paper resources
- it is not peer reviewed
The last reason, not being peer reviewed, is the biggest reason wikipedia is not reliable. Scholar journals and books under-go intensive blind peer reviewing from other scholars and there is serious editing that must be done before it can be published. If wikipedia wished to be a trustworthy souce it needs to get some sort of scholarly editing process, and it would greatly benefit from being connected to other scholar sites such as JSTOR or EbscoHost.
While wikipedia can be great for looking up answers to questions you may have about some facts, it is not worthy or deserving of citation and quotation in your research paper.
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