The time has come: Wikipedia should be a valid citation for academic papers.
Wikipedia is the most significant research tool available to anyone at the present time. Wikipedia's strengths are manifold and unparalleled. The online encyclopedia contains literally millions of articles in the English language alone, and if you want to flip between the French and English accounts of the reign of Louis XIV, that's an easy option. If you'd rather search for everyone involved with the intersection of religion and science, there's a convenient category that will let you scroll a particularized index. If you want a list of births from the year 1883, that's available too. And if you're reading up on Laffer curves but you don't know who Lord Keynes was, just follow the hyperlink. This is arguably the most significant accumulation of knowledge since the original French Encyclopedie, possibly since the Library of Alexandria. But the hyperlinks alone put Wikipedia on a completely different plane.
Wikipedia's reputation has risen dramatically in the past few years. In 2004, I couldn't imagine citing Wikipedia in class. Now preceptors ask students to quickly check simple dates on their laptops, and we all know what they mean. The quality of articles has risen tremendously, and I think that this justifies assuming Wikipedia to be correct, even in the most formal of contexts: academic papers.
Wikipedia has its problems, of course. The most obvious difficulty is the notoriously amateurish content. There have been studies claiming that given the extreme quantity of articles, Wikipedia has fewer mistakes per article than the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I've made corrections to Wikipedia myself. I also remember logging on to the page about President-elect Barack Obama's personal life on Nov. 5 and finding "BARACK OBAMA WON!!!!!!!" repeatedly scrawled across the page. Enthusiastic but unenlightening.
At its best, Wikipedia self-corrects for these issues. Anybody who likes can go wikipedia Wikipedia and read a robust defense of the speed with which professionals casually correct amateurish mistakes. Perhaps more importantly, Wikipedia has a citations policy. Controversial claims or non-obvious pieces of information are supposed to be backed by footnotes (often hyperlinks themselves) that allow the user to independently verify the information. The "citation needed" feature is Wikipedia's saving grace.
For me, the biggest problem with Wikipedia is not low-quality content (on the contrary, I'm usually impressed by the accuracy and organization of articles) but those dratted hyperlinks. They're too tempting. Sometimes I'll be doing Arabic homework, and I get a bit curious about Nasser. So I log on, and before I know it, I'm reading an article on the third Duke of Norfolk. It's so easy to follow the hyperlink road. Perhaps even more than facebook.com, Wikipedia is a timesink.
Yet I think that Wikipedia has a very important role to play in academia. Anyone who has attended a precept at Princeton will know that students backed into a corner and forced to speak, if equipped with a laptop, will read off the Wikipedia page. So Wikipedia has already found its way into the classroom. And if a student cites Wikipedia on a paper, the student is taking a risk: That information might be incorrect. But at this point, Wikipedia is probably right on any given question of fact. If a student wants to cite Wikipedia as a source for the year that John Locke fled to Holland, I think that should be allowed. If the information is wrong, the student must accept the responsibility. To be fair, I've known professors who point out problems in textbooks. Just because it was printed doesn't mean it's correct.
Let me be clear that I only support citing Wikipedia on matters of fact. There are pages on Wikipedia that present argumentation, and here, as always, the student must avoid plagiarism. I can't make John Locke's arguments and pass them off as my own, nor can I do so with the anonymous contributions to Wikipedia's page on the question of God. But if I'm writing a paper on the history of Belgium, it seems to me fair game to use Wikipedia for the date of that country's independence. Honestly, I suspect a professor who can't remember exactly would check the date on Wikipedia him- or herself.
Too much, I think, is made of Wikipedia's faults. Considering the sheer quantity of articles, there are astonishingly few errors. Amateurs do seem to do the professional job very well. (Which is not to discount the professionals who occasionally write articles too.) I still think the most difficult part of the website is the temptation of those hyperlinks. But that's really my problem. The site itself is a tremendous academic aid, and it is time we allowed Wikipedia to come into its own.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarroll@princeton.edu.
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