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Originally Posted by Belfaborac
To say that Wikipedia is garbage as a reference source is clearly BUUUULLL!!!! I have used Wikipedia as a basis for research, articles and lectures scores of times in the last few years. It's almost always my starting point of choice, because I know it will furnish me with a good selection of sources
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No, it will often furnish you with a WIDE selection of sources. You're on your own to find out if they are good or not. A real encyclopedia will have vetted this for you, saving time and effort. That's their job.
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As stated by others, it also very much depends on the area of research: current affairs, on-going conflicts, politics and various religious issues are generally much less reliable than other subjects.
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So you're on your own again to vet out which of the topics you want to research are reliably researched there. A real encyclopedia applies some journalistic and academic standards to ALL it's articles, again, saving you time and effort, as, again, that is their job.
How useful is a reference source when you have to do your own research before hnd to find out if the research in the reference source is reliable?
Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia is an amazing effort, and I use it all the time. But to compare it to a traditional encyclopedia, especially to call it "more accurate," is laughable. That claim is made virtually self-contradictory by Wikipedia's very nature of dynamic public editing.
Wikipedia is great for what it is, but what it is is a quite different beast from the EB. Telling people they are the same kind of beast, and telling them that Wikipedia is a BETTER one of those beasts, is, well, contributing to the decline and fall of civilization.