Type almost any academic search term into Google and the first webpage you see on your list of ‘finds’ is usually Wikipedia. It is also common to use Wikipedia as a source of information in your own life for everything spanning from celebrity gossip to dictionary definitions. Yet most professors prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a source for academic papers. Students often have difficulty understanding why.

As useful as Wikipedia may be, ultimately it is a crowd-sourced, collectively-authored source of information. Some of the information found in its entries may be accurate, very useful, and even authored by experts. But some of it may not. Also, Wikis are constantly changing, based upon the people who feel motivated to make contributions to the webpage.  When researching controversial issues like abortion and Middle East politics, readers must be particularly wary of using Wikipedia as a source of information. Someone who is very opinionated on a particular topic can easily edit the entry to make it seem as if it is common knowledge that a biased point-of-view is the only correct one.

Wikipedia can be useful as an introduction to a topic and some of the sources cited on Wikipedia pages may be legitimate and peer-reviewed. However, because this cannot be guaranteed, you should not use Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper. And this is why at Paperdue.com, none of our professional academic writers use Wikipedia as a source in the sample papers they provide for their customers.