Yeah, but scholars shouldn't be putting things from Wikipedia in their paper at all (except, perhaps, in the very narrow case were Wikipedia is the object of their study).
Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.
First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then cited on Wikipedia.
[ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature of humanity ]
Now you need to get cited by someone else before wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else needs to be cited too of course)
Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters.
If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and it can't be changed or removed without your consent.
(Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough citation, but that's their problem.)
PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for Wikipedia’s benefit.
Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help them critically examine articles.
Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible source on a topic for the hour you're looking at it, and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite.
If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia at all they really should provide an alternative encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
There are hundreds of unpaid volunteers at all times prowling for and reverting vandalism. The most popular articles are next to impossible to change. And to top it all off, if a large amount of vandalism happens on one article, it just gets reverted and locked for a while so no changes can happen, period.
Then anyone following can see what you saw.
Circular references aren't only a problem when it involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others, outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original works have been lost.
With the exception of secondary research, like systematic reviews. Conclusions are good to have.
Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised.
Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods.
This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.