User blog comment:Thor2000/Wikipedia as a Research Tool/@comment-10473115-20150720002434

I think that you have a misconception about the idea of Wikipedia. It's not meant to be a researcher's tool and original research is strictly forbidden there. Everything should be cited so it should be compared to a textbooks or encyclopedias. Contradicting pages aren't any surprise when we're talking about soft sciences. I don't think that those could have a scientific paradigms like in a natural sciences and in the best case scenario, article presents a few most important point of views. Don't take me wrong, I've read a lot of scientific books (that could be the reason I've became the official nitpicker about referencing style, or maybe I've just read the Lord of the Rings one time too much), and most of those have been about social sciences, so I don't try to undervalue the meaning of those sciences. I saw from your bio that you've written books and therefore had done a real research, so I'm sure that you understand enough about a philosophy of science to know better than to trust just a professor to know the truth. I could always find an another professor who would criticize the other's work and they both would preach about the faults of Wikipedia. Until one of them would get an own study cited on Wikipedia and after that, it feels much more reliable.

So you're right that the people tend to rely too much on a any written text and should be warned about that; but on the other hand, it's just too dangerous to trust any authority without the empirical evidence.