Kathleen DeLaurenti, 26/09/19 22:12:
The assumption that the citations are only about works discussing Wikipedia is just not true. Scientists and mathematicians cite it as a definition source on an increasing basis.
Indeed. We could come up with other fields and examples of common usages. My main concern about saying "never cite Wikipedia" is that people end up obscuring their research process and hiding the actual provenance of what they're writing.
Wikipedia mirrors which pretend not to be Wikipedia are legion, but there's also the simpler case of taking a quotation from Wikipedia and then pretending to have checked the actual source's full text. Even if you check the source of the quotation yourself, your paper is not made any better by being silent about the fact that you reached that passage only because the Wikipedia article mentioned it.
The concept I usually cite in public, because it's clear enough even in a 10 min presentation, is "verifiability, not truth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth. This has been watered down in recent times but it's useful precisely because it's shocking to some people. You cannot use Wikipedia to prove something is true, because Wikipedia doesn't care about truth (sort of). However, you can and should be transparent about your thought process and research methods.
Federico