Students have two great resources at their disposable: a mine of material that isn't and never will appear on the World Wide Web, the primary plankton for Wikipedians. And even better, helpful librarians will be able to tailor a bespoke bibliography for the student, bringing years of resource mining experience and specialist skills to the task. If your "jumping off point" for a project is such a librarian, then intelligence will reward intelligence. If your "jumping off point" is Wikipedia, and its over-reliance on web dross, then stupidity will reward stupidity.
Wikipedia builds on the premise that everyone has two cents to contribute to anything, which can lead to catastrophic tragedies when using them as reference for information.
So if you're a student, this is a big no-no. If you're a researcher, browsing Wikipedia serves the purpose of getting sa general feel of the topic, but never for anything written on stone.
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