There really should be an “Intro to College” class that taught things like what types of sources were acceptable and those that aren’t. Also, how to direct your papers to give the teacher what they are looking for, how to find out what they are looking for, how to “recycle” your work for other classes with other instructors, how to introduce quotes in the middle of a sentence to make a smooth transition that looks professional, and more. Once you learn these things, you can go further and document your life’s experiences and get college credit for what you already have learned or even what you researched on your own, as long as it is equivalent to what you would learn in a course from an accredited institution. I got out of a year’s worth of college doing that, and got out of some courses I didn’t particularly want to take by getting a course waiver in the process of writing the documentation for that course. A fellow student got about a year and a half’s worth of college credits that way, too. After some experience, you can knock out the documentation for a course in about 6-12 hours.

Back to Wikipedia–it’s a great source of knowledge for an overview of a subject, and you can, as another poster here said, use it as a springboard to find other articles that will help you with your paper(s).

However, I tell fellow students they can use Wikipedia, but only as a starting point. Use the references at the bottom of the page to find more credible sources for research. I use this quite often when researching topics for my college papers and I consistently get A’s on my papers. It’s something that I think colleges should teach students how to use properly.