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.
Dirk
On Dec 17, 2007 1:49 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps we could submit a few of the better articles to academic journals. And see how that goes. I'm sure we would learn a lot just from trying.
What academic journals take encyclopaedic articles? Don't they generally want original research, which our articles certainly are not?
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