Using Wikipedia
Lorcan Dempsey,
Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog,
Feb 15, 2011
People are still agonizing over the use of Wikipedia in academic work. Personally, I don't really understand the problem. I link freely both to Wikipedia and to mroe primary sources. It depends on what I want to do with the link. Wikipedia is a reference work, like, well, an encyclopedia. It's not a primary source, nor does it pretend to be. So you link to Wikipedia if you want to provide a quick reference for people who want to learn more. And for citations and quotations, the facts on which your own work rests, it is more proper to use primary sources. So I link to journal articles (when they're available online), blog posts, and other primary literature to substantiate my own opinions. The problem only occurs when you create this fabrication, the 'academic paper', which only allows the links to citations, and not to reference material. Which, if you ask me, isn't a very user-friendly way to design academic works. If there's a Wikipedia article - or some other reference work, it doesn't have to be Wikipedia - that provides background on what you're talking about, why not refer to it as a service to the reader?
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