The main uses I have always found with Wikipedia has always been:

1.) Double checking dates.

2.) Decently curated lists. For example Spanish Explorers.

3.) Decent pictures of the topic material.

4.) Timelines.

5.) Links to sources. This allows me to read the material for myself.

6.) Ball parking and refreshers. It's mean't to be an encyclopedia entry, not a deep analysis.

7.) They're fun to read during slow days at work.

That's about it. Outside of dates for events I don't really even trust statistics listed in Wiki articles unless they're sourced and I can verify them on a reputable website. The biggest thing I get out of Wiki articles is discovering something new to go look up on my own on the web, like websites and articles about say...Spanish exploration and settlements in the Southeast United States.

A few years back I caught a student plagiarizing a Wikipedia page, poorly. One that I had written. Sad. But a useful anecdote to tell kids today when I warn them about how eagle-eyed I am about plagiarism and how dumb and obvious it usually is (as I tell them, I have read literally thousands of undergraduate papers — you get a feel for fishiness pretty quickly).

Wikipedia can be useful. Let's not pretend like we don't all use it when checking little things, or even looking for an overview on certain topics. Sometimes it is immensely useful and even well-written. Sometimes it is downright amusing with its levels of trivia ("Milord was likely the most famous animal in the Russian Empire at that time"). But we know it has limits — some of its pages are actually pretty great, better than many allegedly peer-reviewed encyclopedias. But some of them are total shit, the worst of the worst. Being able to differentiate between the two types is sometimes straightforward (lots of "citation needed" etc. tags), sometimes it is much more subtle. So nobody relies on it, even if it can be used as a nice way to quickly look into something.

To put it another way: academics don't rely on any encyclopedias. Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and one that is occasionally very spotty. So you definitely don't want to rely on it.

Which is not to say you can't use it for various things. We live in a world awash in dodgy information — Wikipedia is just one manifestation of that world.

My (least) favorite example of why Wikipedia is bad:

Julius Caesar did not gain the tribunician power in 48 BCE. The only people who think he did are Abbot 1901 and the people who read Abbot 1901 and nothing else. Abbot doesn't even give a reason why he thinks this. Probably because of one comment in Cassius Dio that no one takes seriously. Goldsworthy doesn't even discuss Caesar in relation to the tribunes.

Wikipedia is useful as a starting point, sometimes. It's useful to get an overview so you know where to start in your own research. It is not the one-stop shop that so many people try to use it for. It is a reference tool that gets you started on the real research.

I have occasionally recommended Wikipedia pages in answers on AskHistorians, but only after I have read them, looked at the citations, and using my knowledge as an expert in my field, I know that the citations are good citations and the Wiki editor is writing from a position of authority. But that's because I also know what's up with that topic. There have also been many occasions that I read a Wiki page to try to get an overview of a topic, and found that it was actually very poorly cited, biased, and not up to the standards of AskHistorians, and so I did not recommend it. I've seen many Wikipedia articles that looked well-cited, but all the citations were blogs, websites, and books a hundred years old. Very much a poorly-supported article, even though it looked good on first glance. I've also seen plenty of articles that do cite plenty of academic articles, but only from one side of an argument, and so very important objections get covered up.

The way I use Wikipedia is to get a feel for sequences, the rough outline of a topic, and some dates and stuff to work with. I often try to see what works the author is citing, and Wikipedia is often good in that they provide links to many sources that I can then follow through on, and see for myself if the argument is good or not.

This next bit is very important. Never copy sources without reading them. This isn't just about plagiarism, although that is a serious issue. This is about accurate scholarship. I have seen articles where certain articles are cited in support of a point, but the cited article is actually making the exact opposite point. The researcher didn't read the article closely enough, or misquoted it, or something, and the editor didn't catch it, and the bad citation got published. As a researcher, you have to follow up citations that you are using, you have to know what the original author actually said, and not just parrot a potentially misquoted citation. Always always read the source for yourself before you use it, to avoid other people's errors.

So even when you are using Wikipedia as a starting point, getting some sources to start out with, and getting a feel for the topic at hand, don't blindly copy the citations, but read them for yourself.

The best way to get a bunch of citations is to find a current source on the topic (maybe cited on Wikipedia, or in a journal, or Google Scholar or something), read it and if it's a good article, go through its bibliography and get additional sources to read from there. As you read those sources, check out their bibliographies for things the first article didn't include. You can also find a couple starting point articles and see how much they overlap as well.

But basically, never stop at just Wikipedia, unless you just need to refer to some basic outline information.

Wikipedia's pages on the Ottomans are almost universally based on Orientalist scholars whose work predates the major revolution Ottoman studies underwent from the 1980s onward. Other favorite sources include random websites, books by historians who aren't specialists in the Ottoman Empire, books by people who aren't historians at all, and books published in the nineteenth century.

Thankfully, it appears that the old community which used to work on Ottoman-related pages is now entirely dead, which has allowed me to gradually begin a process of fixing some of the awful mess which they left behind, without having to cut my way through Wikipedia's usual red tape.

I use it to double check language stuff. Not linguistics stuff, but like, how did this guy romanise his name that's different from whatever the official modern romanisation is, or if I need to double check the most common English spelling of मुचलिन्द. All pretty superficial.

If I try to actually read the articles about my field, I get irritated really quickly. In our department a few people are really pushing others in the dept to edit/update relevant articles since, wrong as Wikipedia generally is, people do rely on it, so we need to make it right for the stuff we do. But I just can't be bothered. I have too many experiences with fixing/writing an article and then a year later seeing it butchered beyond recognition.

I've also run into problems as an undergrad, back when I was contributing a lot. I wrote a paper on an obscure (to the average person) Islamic political movement in Persia way back when. There was no Wikipedia article for this topic, so after I turned in the paper, I went and wrote an article based on the research I'd just done. Unfortunately the professor was slow to check papers and I was too eager to post the article, so in the end I got busted for plagiarising the Wikipedia article, that I wrote, after I wrote the paper. I ended up having to show the prof that the account behind the article was mine, and the time stamp showing it was after I'd turned in the paper. It was a dumb move on my part but I was thankfully let off the hook. Thanks, Dr. Whateveryournamewas.

That's also one of the articles I spent a lot of time on with good sources that was then murdered by consensus. The article only briefly mentions the historical events anymore and is now about some other thing that kinda once borrowed the name of that earlier group, but not really. It's an awful article.

In my experience, Wikipedia can be a starting point to get the ball rolling on your own research, but if you rely on it in any way, you're not only missing out on the likely more important research being done, you also probably going to end up being wrong.

However the worst case of this is when someone changes articles to include citations of their own work. There are a couple really terrible linguistics papers written by non-linguists that somehow got published, and the authors have gone an edited every Wikipedia page that relates to the topic so that it cites their paper. You know it's them because their Wikipedia account names are their real names. The paper is really awful, scientifically unsound, linguistically nonsensical, and would be obvious as such to anyone in linguistics who actually deals with the topic, but because it sounds good to a lay person, and because they've injected their shit all over Wikipedia, you see it get cited again and again by people who don't actually know. It's Kardashianesque and more than a little frustrating.

The Islamic studies entries on Wikipedia are a goddamn mess. 99% of the time they are presenting basically a Saudi-ized (or sectarian equivalent) devout religious view of the topic at hand (i.e citing hadith and sira with no source skepticism whatsoever, usually with a ton of interpretative citations from, often, Pakistani English-speaking religious scholars) or they go in completely the opposite direction by citing Western skeptics with no regard to the place of these scholars in the historiography. These "skeptical" articles tend to be the ones that have analogy to new atheist skepticism of Christianity. So, actually the historicity of Muhammad is not much of a controversy in Islam the way it has been for Christianity. And yet that article gets skepticism, whereas an article on, say, the development of Shiism is told almost entirely from the perspective of contemporary orthodox twelver Shiism, e.g.:

Shia Muslims believe that just as a prophet is appointed by God alone, only God has the prerogative to appoint the successor to his prophet. They believe God chose Ali to be Muhammad's successor, infallible, the first caliph (khalifa, head of state) of Islam.

Well, is that true? Did they always believe that? Did Ali's supporters believe that? Were there Shia who ever believed more or less than that?

Among the sources then included a bit further down for information about "Hassan ceding the caliphate to Muawiyah" is from a wesbite for an Islamic research institute in Qom, Iran.

Or, alternatively, it Wikipedia might simply not have an article on the topic (in English) whatsoever.

As a result, I'm often far more comfortable referring to 50 year old entries in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam than I am with anything in Islamic studies from Wikipedia.

An utter mess.

I do like wikipedia for its images (which are usually high-quality and easy to access), and have used them on this sub. This post cites Wikipedia's image policy as one of the problems with the site. I would love to hear more on this subject, both so I can make sure my posts hew as closely as possible to the rules, and for the philosophical discussion itself.

This is basically a follow up question, but what are some sites where I find proper sources/papers? In Informatics/Mathematics/Biology there are multiple paper aggregation sites. Does something like this exist for history?

Let's say as an example, I'm interested in learning about Pre-European South-East African Civilizations. How would I go about researching about that for myself? Just google and take what I find?

Citing sources is not necessarily an indicator of quality. The sources could be misinterpreted, out-of-date, or not representative of the range of opinions among scholars. For the reasons above this is a particularly troublesome task on wikipedia, where there's no way of verifying whoever added the source knows whether a source is reliable, and whether it represents academic thought on a subject.

And who determines this to be the case or not in this sub? Why are the mods here less biased and more knowledgable than those editing Wikipedia?

Wikipedia should never be cited but I've found it pretty useful to get an overview of the topic if I'm unsure about it and to find sources for whatever it is I'm writing. It's an amazing first step but should never be the final one.

citing someone who is citing is bad