I dunno... Wikipedia has its flaws (like, the entry on Star Wars is the same size as the entry on Africa), but it's a good starting point for research. When I was teaching freshman comp, I would tell students that they could use Wikipedia as a source only if they verified the information elsewhere. I also didn't let them use it as one of their three required sources (like, they could use it, but they couldn't actually count it as one of their three).
Despite these roadblocks, many of them made good use of it. If I had to write a research paper on a topic I didn't know a whole lot about, I could do worse than noodling around on Wikipedia for an hour looking for leads.
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