I agree with Middlebury College policy: Wikipedia should be just a starting point to research for college students. There is a lot of information out there and it's hard to trust most of it. Wikipedia is the first source that shows up in google, use it. Don't base your whole research paper about what you found in Wiki because it could be faulty. It's okay to find little things like just today I used it to find the magnetic field strength of Earth, I had information to back it up. I just needed that one more source to let me know I was correct.
With my major, and many in depth majors. It's hard to find a source for the answer you are looking for and even then, I would trust Wiki over some other sources that don't look very credible. The information on certain topics aren't very general. This leads to hey, looks like Wiki is the only site that has what I need. What else is there to do? You can't find it in your book, you google it and find it on Wiki.
In high school, we were never under any circumstances allowed to use Wiki for a work cited source. If it was on there, automatic fail. For this reason, I don't really use Wikipedia too much because it's just drilled in my head not to. However the information is not very hard to change on Wiki. I remember a group of my guy friends in high school who changed the bibliography of history figures that we had discussed that day. They got a good laugh as to how long it lasted on there, it was gone the next day. For this reason it would be a good idea to use Wiki because so many people read it and review it. In my opinion it shouldn't matter if you cite Wikipedia. It's reliable and convenient.
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