re: #246 lawhawk

Wikipedia is increasingly accepted as valid source material in legal cases, so claiming that it isn’t a valid source to cite to simply ignores reality. It’s an online source used by millions of people, and plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless of the material source.

If you copypasta this comment somewhere else and treat it as your own, it’s still plagiarism, even though I’m anonymous and posting it on a web-board.

The same goes with Wikipedia. There are page versions and other ways to identify and date-stamp changes to that site, so there’s some level of accountability on changes to information there. You can go back and look at edit-histories, so it’s not as though someone can anonymously edit a page and no one would know. That’s just not how the site works.

But again, the definition of plagiarism doesn’t change just because of the source material.

My brother and his department do not accept Wikipedia as a valid reference in submitted papers. For the research I see using Wikipedia as a starting point to *find* references, but it’s not a valid end point.