Also the more advanced the subject matter of an article on Wikipedia the more likely it is to be complete bollocks. Read wiki and then look at the sources they use rather than referencing Wikipedia itself.

use Wikipedia's sources

"Book-only" method are still used today in many colleges and universities.  There's just too much BS on the internet that professors dont want to deal with.

Professors don't particularly hate Wiki, most of them I know use it quite often.  If you're referencing for a paper though you shouldn't reference Wiki simply because it's not the original source for anything that's posted there.  As others have said use the references that Wiki gives to start you off.

Now while I was in University there was something interesting I heard from my buddy while we was talking about Wikipedia, Wikipedia is about as inaccurate as the Oxford Encyclopedia, that said professors don't want students using encyclopedias for papers cause they'd rather you grab the original documents and analyze them yourself.  So even if you can write an 8 page paper using only Wikipedia, and even if what you wrote is as accurate and as right as if you went to source material or academic material, you'll get dogged just cause you didn't use academic sources.  I personally think it's lame.  But most papers need atleast 3 sources so you'd be dogged regardless, but I still feel Wikipedia should be allowed as a source.

Exactly I always use the references as well but i use wiki as a starting source.

I do but when i tell them that im using a source from there they still trip.

Here is a smart idea.

Use Wikipedia... look at where what you want to do is sources....

then source that.

It's what I did when I was feeling particularly lazy.

Really though, if you plant o do anything involving research for a living you should learn how to use jounral programs.

Then... don't?

I don't know about most professors, but if I was teaching a course I certainly wouldn't want my students to use Wikipedia as a source because you would be bound to get dozens of very similar papers; and it would be difficult to determine whether they were bad students or cheaters.