ahh, the wikipedia is useless concerns.

There was a panel put together to find out how valid Wikipedia was in comparison to Encyclopedia Britanica. They collected data from 42 experts  in different fields. What the subjects were. there are bunch. 
(http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html)

The scores or errors in this case on average.
Wikipedia scored 3.86 errors on average of the 13 different articles.
Britannica scored 2.92.

That put's wikipedia really close to Britannic. The problem arises from Internet meme and Academic Weight vs Crowd Wisdom. Internet Meme tend to appeal for it's humour and easy to use references. It'e pretty common to insult Wiki's right out the gate because it leans on the idea that humanity are morons and it's easy to edit. The Academic Weight... is well weighty. People have a tendency to believe authority even if it's wrong(http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm). Though the experiment in link is "live" and their. The idea still stems that people still weigh Authority and "Learned" to be correct. It's the status state.

Crowd Wisdom however is reliant on the collective information of people. Keeping mind that Academics are also a part of these people. So the information is potentially as valid in crowd wisdom as any single authority. The issue arises is that the term is "CROWD" or sum of people rather than singular. When the Crowd offers information it will be close to correct. However Wikipedia does leave that situation where a single person can fuck everything up. This means a person can be wrong. Including Academics. Don't forget the paradigm shift from Newtonian Law to Relativity. The mass of scientific authority firmly believed that Newtonian law was the only law of the universe. It took years, but it was replaced.

Is Wikipedia is bad.. no it's not. It's a very valid source of information. Just be careful of errors and single dip shits who will create BS. Also Wikipedia only covers information on a certain cursory level of information. If you want really deep studies then it's always best to do more research.

@mad55: Someone has probably already said it, but take wikipedia out of the equation when sourcing. If you are sourcing something that you found out about because of Wikipedia, find where the info came from and source that.This shouldn't be hard to do.

I think of it this way: If you are posting a piece of gaming news/info to the forum, would you post a link to some random blog that picked it up, an aggregate site like digg/reddit, or would you find the original source of the information and link them? Unless you are darth, the answer should be to find and cite the original source.

I think we all know that wikipedia is in fact accurate. Your professors know that, as do we. Just cite the sources that wikipedia cites to make them happy.

Wikipedia is the greatest compilation of human archiving ever created throughout our history. There is far more infomation available through Wikipedia than anyone could read or comprehend over several lifetimes. To degrade if for unavoidable inaccuracies is ignorant. Any project of this scope would be inaccurate to a certain extent. Wikipedia is sourced, and it is an invaluable tool to humanity. With a simple smart phone you have more information at your fintertips than a room filled with the 100 brightest human minds ever to grace this earth. This information simply wasn't available 10 years ago.

How big is wikipedia:

Wikipedia says:

Currently, the English Wikipedia alone has over 3,461,291 articles of any length, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeded the English Wikipedia in size, giving a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in approximately 250 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 1 billion words, over 25 times as many as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, and more than the enormous 119-volume Spanish-language Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana.

Oh WOW!

They just don't want the importance of their professions underminded. Which I understand, but Wikipedia is a more reliable source than most professors will have you believe. Sure basically anyone can put anything on there they want, but they are always backed up by sources, and constantly monitored.

Oh just to add to my previous post. Don't get me wrong, I think Wikipedia is an amazing tool and if I want to find out about something it's generally one of the first places I visit. Just don't take the information on Wikipedia as the be all and end all on a subject as I've already explained. Most stuff requires further research if you're going to use it in your work.

And they're quite right too - in context.  Hit the library for the real stuff.

it's just that saying you took from Wikipedia basically means that someone did the research for you. it's not really full of bollocks as long as you don't take everything you read as gospel, and check the sources.

regarding advanced stuff, at least in computer/math topics it's actually quite accurate/not full of shit. a bunch of really theoretical stuff (category theory) was quite "complete" for beginners.