Answered By: Matt Stevons
Last Updated: Aug 11, 2020     Views: 2952

Most instructors will not consider Wikipedia an academic source you can cite in your coursework.  

Similarly, you may have been warned that there is a lot of bad information on Google as well and that you need to be careful when searching on the web. 

However, these are still very popular sources used every day by academics and researchers.  What is their role, then, in academic research? See the video linked to below, "Beginning Research with Google and Wikipedia," which will introduce you to the pros and cons of using Google and Wikipedia as tools for gathering information.  "About Wikipedia," the embedded video on this page, delves into more detail about what Wikipedia is and more about why it's not an acceptable citation in most academic work.

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