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Wikipedia has been the center of a much heated and critical debate in academia pertaining to the relevance, accuracy, and effectiveness of using information found online in academic research, especially in places where information is constantly being created, revised, and deleted by people of various backgrounds, ranging from experts to curious learners.
Research topics have included the reliability of the encyclopedia and various forms of systemic bias; social aspects of the Wikipedia community (including administration, policy, and demographics); the encyclopedia as a dataset for machine learning; and whether Wikipedia trends might predict or influence human behaviour.
Wikipedia is now ubiquitous—a free-content encyclopedia available online, covering millions of topics in up to 280 languages. It is one of the most high-profile examples of user-generated content, and by far the most heavily used non-commercial internet site—it and its sister projects collectively have a hundred thousand active contributors, five hundred million readers, and twenty billion ...
These results also yield important knowledge applicable to other open content communities. In addition to driving scholarly knowledge of such systems, this work can also give results that can improve Wikipedia itself. Much valuable research cannot be done without Wikipedia community members who volunteer to participate in studies.
If it is important to discuss such findings in the Wikipedia article, the most reliable source available should be used. If a peer-reviewed article is published after a newspaper, blog, or other non-peer-reviewed publication of the research, both may be used, but in a conflict, the peer-reviewed publication is more authoritative and reliable.
It is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source. Individual articles will, by the very nature of Wikipedia, vary in standard and maturity. This page is intended to help users and researchers do this effectively.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic writing or research. Wikipedia is increasingly used by people in the academic community, from first-year students to distinguished professors, as an easily accessible tertiary source for information about anything and everything and as a quick "ready reference", to get a sense of a concept or idea.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-05/In the news#Wikipedia graph used in UN climate report Michael R. Nelson, "Building an Open Cloud", Science 324(5935):1656-1657 cites Browser wars Richard Hartley and Fredrik Kahl, "Global Optimization through Rotation Space Search", International Journal of Computer Vision cites Quaternion , Sphere and ...