What’s so bad about referencing Wikipedia?

Wikipedia has editorial standards that frequently exceed those of peer-reviewed scientific journals. Most scientists could confirm for you that it is tougher to get an article into Wikipedia than into most journals, and the end-result is almost invariably a better edited and more polished read. It is the shining example of what the internet could be, a vast and ever-growing reservoir of knowledge available to all and constantly improving.

Technical articles in particular are ruthlessly scrutinized and even minor errors seldom survive long; that is certainly not true in all of the world’s journals. On a vast range of subject matters, Wikipedia is comprehensive and authoritative, and with higher editorial standards than many journals. Scientists all over the world secretly start their literature reviews on Wikipedia. So why is referencing it such a sure invitation to ridicule?

Most people doing the ridiculing are acting right out of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ playbook. They certainly couldn’t articulate any good reason why you shouldn’t reference it, but they have heard others pass judgment so they do the same with certainty that the herd will agree with them.

So what is the original cause here? What’s so bad about referencing Wikipedia?

The key issue is one of permanence rather than credibility. It’s not that Wikipedia fails to meet some arbitrary standard for the quality of a source; it’s that it is constantly updated, which interferes with scientific reproducibility. One of the fundamental concepts behind scientific advancement is that a scientific conclusion does not have to be perfect or complete, or even correct. To meet the standards of scientific validity, a result has to be reproducible by someone duplicating the experiment. That means that another scientist, following the same procedure and referring to the same resources, must reliably get to the same result.

If I write a paper today which references a journal article, a scientist fifty years from now, checking my references, will read the exact same article and will therefore have the same context for all of my arguments and premises. A Wikipedia page simply can’t provide the same context, and so it can’t be cited as part of an unbroken chain of incremental scientific knowledge generation.

There is another reason for the stigma against citing Wikipedia, which demands of us a bit of speculation. Imagine a situation where referencing Wikipedia was universally normalized. People would be able to create and edit pages on the fly to support whatever argument they happen to be making in an academic paper and with that incentive in place, many would do so. Wikipedia would very rapidly lose its credibility, dragging the scientific literature with it.

The only reason Wikipedia is credible enough that you could reference it, is that you can’t reference it. The website may well stand alongside the scientific literature as a bastion of human knowledge and learning, but the two must be kept separate for the survival of both.