Wikipedia as a reliable source

The readings we had from the book Wikinomics were incredibly interesting. Of course I was aware of the collaborative nature that new and existing projects and companies were starting to employ in a huge scale, but I had never thought that much about it until I read this book. It is so amazing how connected everybody is from all around the world, and the amount of work that can be accomplished by this "collective genius" is astounding. It personally makes me feel that I have the ability to make a much larger impact on the world, in whatever way I choose, than I had before. 

One of the topics that was discussed that is closest to home for me was the issue of Wikipedia being a reliable source for information. For my entire college career, Wikipedia has always been such a huge help when researching different subject matters for class projects or papers, or heck, most of the time if I am interested in something and I want to find out more information about it, Wikipedia is always the first place I look. It has always been such a pain because my professors have always been adamant about us students not being allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source in any research we do for class. This is oftentimes the biggest pain ever because you'll find the most perfect quote from Wikipedia and would love to incorporate it into your paper, but you know you'll get an F on the paper if you include it. This whole issue is caused by the fact that anybody can edit a Wikipedia article, thus making the professors think that crazy idiots regularly spew inaccurate information all over the articles. 

But the publication of a study's findings in the journal Nature should have all my teachers starting to rethink their stance on using Wikipedia as a source. This article helps further explain the study, but in short, it was found that a Wikipedia article only has on average 3.86 mistakes per article, whereas Britannica, the "golden standard" of sources, has on average 2.96 mistakes per article!!! Oh my goodness! If this doesn't make my strategy teacher rethink his policy on letting us use Wikipedia articles as sources, I don't know what will!