: Re: Is Wikipedia Trustworthy? So in elementary school, I was told not to use Wikipedia too much because you can't trust what they write. So then for all the projects, I used the Canadian Encyclopedia,

@Candy753

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If you search a little bit, you will find article after article dealing with this question, especially in the academic sphere. There is a long list of criticism of Wikipedia.

Some of it goes back to it nature, such as the fact that it is a crowd-sourced site. Some of it goes back to its policies, e.g. its open denial of expert knowledge or its stance on deletism. And some of it goes back to its practices, such as closed administrator circles or the running of the foundation.

So in essence, many different people have many different reasons to be somewhere between cautious and critically opposed to Wikipedia, and in considering all of their arguments and their respective validities, one has to admit that at least some of the criticism is most likely true and important enough to not rely on Wikipedia as a source.

That does not mean you cannot use Wikipedia at all, but it should be one of your sources, not the only or the primary one. Some schools or universities have a strict policy of not using Wikipedia as a source at all, but even that does not mean you cannot go to Wikipedia to get a quick overview of a topic and find links to primary and secondary sources there, which you then can use and cite.

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