Can I use wikipedia for my university essays?
Yes and no. Wikipedia is a convenient and useful website for getting some background information about a topic or concept. In a way, it is like a dictionary and encyclopaedia. However, by its very nature, the website is academically unreliable because the information it supports is unverifiable and may be added by almost anyone regardless of their expertise or knowledge. Therefore, you should never use information that you have found on wikipedia in your academic writing and you should not include it in your reference list but you could use wikipedia as a starting point to get an overview of a topic or to find more suitable references.
