Is it true you cant use wikipedia in college/univeristy?

if so im ****** =(Is it true you cant use wikipedia in college/univeristy?
Yes, it's true. You cannot cite Wikipedia as a source...and you shouldn't have been if able to if you attended a half-decent high school.





The best way to use Wikipedia is read the page to get a general overview of the topic, and to then look at the footnotes that link you to more reputable sources.Is it true you cant use wikipedia in college/univeristy?
No, that's not true. While you probably don't want to cite it as a primary source in a paper, it links to all the sources you DO want to use.





My graduate professor in physics often tells us to 'wikipedia' things.
Wikipedia and Google are good places to start when trying to find a topic, but they are horrible ways to end. My English professor told our class that we shouldn't use wikipedia, and one kid said that its just as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. My professor got kind of grumpy and told him that we shouldn't be using encyclopedias anyways. In college you need to get more reliable sources than random internet pages that you can't verify. Each professor has different expectations, and they will tell you what sources they want you to use. Most will not accept wikipedia or most webpages.





Don't worry though, it won't be as hard as you think. I didn't have much experience with rearch papers in high school, but there are people to help you. As a freshmen there will probably have programs to teach you about this stuff, and if not you can talk to someone in the library, tutoring center, or your professor. Most schools (I think) subscribe to online databases with TONS of articles from acedemic journals and other reliable places. You just type in what you need, and you get a list of articles.
You really shouldn't use it. Most college libraries have internet databases with everything you could possibly need for any research you'll be doing. Most professors will tell you ';Don't use Wikipedia in my class.'; But as a general rule I'd try to get away from it.
You can ';use'; (read: consult) Wikipedia for anything you want, anytime. However, you absolutely cannot use Wikipedia for research papers or anything that will be a graded assignment. Professors don't feel that you can rely on Wikipedia because of it's transitive nature (that is, people can go on and edit it whenever they want, and often facts are incorrect), but sometimes it can be beneficial to visit Wikipedia to learn something related to what you're researching. For example, if I'm writing a paper about the history of Immanuel Kant's life, I could consult Wikipedia for an explanation of what his philosophical ideas were, just for my information. I cannot, however, use anything I read on Wikipedia in my paper.





In college, you'll need to become familiar with scholarly journals (articles written by reliable sources that are peer-reviewed prior to publication) and print sources. You'll find that much of what you read on the internet is not reliable, and not a complete explanation of the subject.





Search the web for JSTOR to take a look at a database of scholarly journals similar to those you'll need to use in college.





As an aside, I'd be surprised if any high school teacher allows you to use Wikipedia for assignments. Do they? I'm not in high school any longer, but I assumed that high school teachers would prohibit it, just like college professors do.