W9 : When do you think we can use wikipedia as a source? / YANG RUIXIN

Wikipedia has become the first-ever updated encyclopedia in the world, promoting the collation and sharing of human knowledge and making knowledge free and open.

But in Wikipedia, we still find incorrect information. Because the "Wikipedia" entry comes from the folk, anyone can write, although there is a dedicated person to manage the site, as its disclaimer says," Wikipedia does not guarantee the validity of its content ".

A lot of people think that Wikipedia's "authority" is not that his content is really authoritative, but because all his content requires second-hand information and requires a reference. First-hand information —— is your own experience, for example, you see the sky is blue, you say the sky is blue；Or you do an experiment, you take out the experimental data is a hand-in-hand information. Second-hand information —— is what you listen to, such as the news you see in the newspaper, the text in the textbook, the articles in the science journal, and so on.

Although not guaranteed that all information itself is authoritative, he will certainly have a source.

When someone questions the professionalism of an entry, the value of the reference is reflected: the content of any qualified entry can verify the source, that is, put the credibility on the table. In other words, he handed over the judgment of authority to the reader himself.

Then we need to think，When do you think we can use Wikipedia as a source? 

First of all, we already know that Wikipedia's position is to quickly tell the reader about the "basic" situation of something, and also you can use Wikipedia for this purpose.

That is to say, Wikipedia is the best aggregation tool when we want to quickly understand the "basics" of one thing.

But if you want real history or data for academic research, you don't choose Wikipedia, but authoritative history books or academic literature.