Researching with Wikipedia

As with many information sources not everything in Wikipedia is accurate, comprehensive, or unbiased. This article, by Wikipedia editors, describes ways to evaluate and use Wikipedia as a research tool, including an overview of its strengths and weaknesses, as well as ways to judge article quality. As they say in the summary, "You should not use Wikipedia by itself for primary research (unless you are writing a paper about Wikipedia.)"

• Using Wikipedia for Academic Research
  Short video from the Cooperative Library Instruction Project (CLIP) on legitimate ways to use Wikipedia for academic research.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cql_yVUYj6A
  
  
• Wikipedia: List of controversial issues
  This list provides examples of controversial articles that have been heavily edited. Useful for seeing how changes get made.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues

• Manypedia:
  Compare wikipedia articles on different language wikipedia sites, e.g. see how the Syrian Civil War is described on the English and Arabic language Wikipedias
  http://www.manypedia.com/

•  Listen to Wikipedia:
  A fun way to illustrate how often Wikipedia gets changed
  http://listen.hatnote.com/

• Reliability of Wikipedia, example:
  Drug Safety in the Digital Age. New England Journal of Medicine 2014; 370:2460-2462
  Researchers examined 22 drug safety warnings issued by FDA between 2011 and 2012 for an array of diseases and conditions, including hepatitis C, hypertension and leukemia. They then assessed the accuracy and timeliness of Wikipedia entries related to each drug for 60 days before and after the FDA communications were issued. Results were not promising.