On 17/12/2007, Dirk Riehle dirk@riehle.org wrote:
Academic papers reference other written work for many purposes. The most common one is to position one's own work, so you refer to what's come before your work or working going on in parallel and how your's is different. For a variety of reasons you won't or shouldn't find that work on Wikipedia.
Still, there are good reasons for referencing Wikipedia, typically ancillary, and not for original research. Examples that come to mind are "for a short introduction on X, see Wikipedia article on X" or "as the editing frequency of X on Wikipedia shows, the topic X is of much broader interest than Y which hasn't seen a revision in months."
I don't see many folks objecting to the second type of use.
We're not talking about referencing Wikipedia in an academic paper, we're talking about publishing a Wikipedia article in an academic journal.