seckle wrote:i spoke nothing of "class". you did. i'm just making the point that while one set of people are quick to write it off, others see it's adaptability as it's ultimate success.
This is getting like an argument over whether a lumphammer is a useful tool - someone saying that it's bugger all use to someone who designs microchips isn't saying it's got no use in general. The fact that Wikipoedia isn't acceptable as a reference in an academic work isn't denying that it's got a lot of other uses, it's just saying something about what a reference in an academic work needs to be.
The changeability of it is a big part of this, I think - if I reference something to back up my argument, I need to know that it'll still say the same thing in a week or a month or in ten years if someone decides to go through my paper looking for holes. But what I can do is look at the list of references in the wikipedia article, to find out where the information came from. Most of those are print magazines or books, so if use them directly and then give a reference to them, anyone who wants to check my source can go to the British Library or whatever and look it up.
Also, if I'm going to trust something that's written on the internet enough to use it in an academic argument that other people are going to try to knock down, I want to know where it comes from so I can evaluate how trustworthy it is. In the case of wikipedia, I have no idea whether a fact about the history of dubstep was contributed by Hatcha talking about something that happened when he was there or by some kid who thinks that it's all dnb records played at 33.[1] Again, the information on wikipedia where I can evaluate the accuracy of the source is the stuff where it comes pretty directly from a magazine article, an interview, a book or something like that. I may evaluate it as being 'pretty weak' if its a two paragraph NME article or 'pretty good' if it's an unedited transcript of a lengthy interview from the Wire, but the important thing is that I
can evaluate it.
So why reference wikipedia when you can go back to the original sources for anything on it that's actually good enough to be worth quoting? Better to use it as a first port of call and then follow through it's references for the stuff to actually quote. Even from the point of view of someone writing an academic piece, I think it's really useful because of this.
[1] Maybe this isn't such an issue with dubstep, but if I'm writing about history and politics I really need to know where information is coming from, because a lot of people have the incentive to talk bullshit.)