‘It’s against all principles of scientific reporting’: Thousands of medical papers cite Wikipedia, study says

‘It’s against all principles of scientific reporting’: Thousands of medical papers cite Wikipedia, study says
Tom Blackwell, National Post, March 18, 2014
This alarmist "the world is ending" headline is typical of the National Post, but the sentiment against citing Wikipedia is far more widespread. So what's the issue? "There is no guarantee the information at any given time is, in fact, wholly accurate, and a Wikipedia entry cited by a journal paper one day may be quite different soon after, unlike a conventional article or book." This of course misrepresents how a wiki operates. References to Wikipedia cite specific dates and times viewed, and this version never changes - when someone makes a change, a completely new version of the page is created, and the old one stored as an archive. So we can indeed see exactly what was cited. More...