Originally Posted by
Aphelion
My university has banned us from using Wikipedia as a source reference, because compared to the other resources (periodicals, reviews, conference papers, patents etc) the open internet comes almost last in terms of reliability.
Well, this makes sense. Wikipedia is definitely not designed to be referenced as it is not a source of information; it is merely a collation of data, and should be treated as such. However, a lot of Wikipedia's sources
are some of those that you mentioned before- Peer-reviewed papers and essays, periodicals, books and other reliable sources.
This is
espescially true for medical pages.
So while it's not appropriate to reference a wikipedia page, check out where the page authors found the information, and you'll often be linked to useful books and papers of undebatabley reliable origin.