What Is Wikipedia and How Should My Students Use It?

Wkipedia's name means "a collaborative website encyclopedia". The basis of Wikipedia is that its information can be edited or added to by contributors who, it seems, can be anyone. The encyclopedia's credibility is not very well trusted because it can be contributed to or edited in this way. However, one good thing about the encyclopoedia is that it does ask for certain guidelines for contributing. The contributor must have a neutral point of view as well as provide credible citations, sources and references. Articles often have links to other websites and sources of information as well. This "grass roots" project has more than 75,000 active contributors working on 9,000,000 articles worldwide in over 250 languages.
I feel that Wikipedia is a good way to get started with research. In other words, its information can get a student on the road to information gathering in ther research process. However, as a teacher, I would not recommend that this be a primary source or even a final source for information in writing. The links that the website provides within its articles can be more reliable and usable as confirmation sources of information, so as a research tool, I would encourage my students to use Wikipedia minimally.