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Comment by clinta | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it". It was treated as untrustworthy, despite other encylopedias being acceptable. I haven't been in school in a while so I can't say if attitudes have changed. But I'd hope that modern instructors would consider any encyclopedias to be too generic for citing in research, but acceptable for understanding the basics of a topic.

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The policy pretty much everywhere that I have encountered, since I was in elementary school in the 1980s, has been that tertiary sources like encyclopedias should never be cited for the information they contain (except when you are citing it because the point of interest isn't the information that is in the encyclopedia but the fact that it is in the encyclopedia, such as if you are writing about how certain events are presented in various venues.) I think the first elementary school research paper I did was an exception and permitted citing one encyclopedia among the three sources required.

Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,

(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)

WRT your parenthetical, it's historically normal for journalists to have lax standards. The web didn't invent pressure to publish. I think you're actually seeing increased transparency.

At least for my fields of interest, encyclopediae are never considered appropriate references for college student papers—Wikipedia is not exceptional in that regard.

That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.

   It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors.

In other words, it's an encyclopedia.

Quantity has a quality all its own, regarding both aspects.

2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed. The principle was "anyone can edit it, therefore only trust things with multiple sources". A reasonable policy really.

> 2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed.

That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.

There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.

Technically, that's always been the case for encyclopedias for any college serious about academics. You should cite the source, not the editorialized version of it.

> In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it"

IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.

It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).

I think it's important to point out the huge generational gap that formed around that opinion. It was really only the Baby Boomers who looked down on Wikipedia during that time. We all had a sense of their growing lack of relevance back then, but it hasn't been until today that we generally all agree the Boomers won't regain relevance.

Not sure if this is a universal change, but at least in my experience with professors the past few years I've been told it's ok to use code examples on Wikipedia for stuff or that I can cite articles.

But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.

Maybe they're warming to the idea now.

Honestly, I feel like High School teachers don't like Wikipedia because it's overpowered. What's the point of making a research assignment when Wikipedia already contains all the research a student could want?

>In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it".

Well, for academic purposes, it still is.

But then again, as then, it's still used for those purposes now, despite the policy.

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