This is pretty close to the reasoning. You can broadly categorize sources into three tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary sources are the actual d

This is pretty close to the reasoning. You can broadly categorize sources into three tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary sources are the actual documents or individual recollections involved in an event—a treaty, a memoir, a transcript, etc. These are the archival documents that historians love. A programming-language-analogy might be writing something in a close-to-the-metal language like Assembly or C. Secondary sources are usually synthetic works that comment on primary sources and other secondary sources, or strongly advance/test a certain hypothesis. These would be the works produced by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and so on analyzing the historical data and evaluating the theories of other social scientists. Most books fall into this category. The analogy would be higher level languages like Java and Ruby. Tertiary works are produced for the general reader. Rather than providing new scholarship or advancing a hypothesis, they generally try to summarize the existing consensus in a concise manner. Because encyclopedia articles aim to give the generalist reader an overview, they are usually a good starting point for someone with no background in a particular area. But, the idea behind writing analytical or research papers is to get the student beyond just a general familiarity with a subject, and to get them to engage some part of the debate. Citing encyclopedias, while in and of itself not wrong, it usually evidence that the student hasn't really engaged the topic. Presumably, if they've read 3-6 secondary sources, they would have all the citations they needed and the encyclopedia would be extraneous. The programming analogy here would be using very little code to paste together a bunch of libraries that you don't understand. Wikipedia has an additional epistemic problem that other encyclopedias usually don't have. Other encyclopedia entries are usually written by experts in their field. There is no such guarantee for Wikipedia articles: they could be written by experts, they could be written by 14-year-old Singaporean communists writing from their mother's basement (I speak from experience as an admin who's had to deal with this scenario). While studies have shown Wikipedia to be comparable in terms of quality to mainstream encyclopedias, there's no way of telling at any given moment which revision you're viewing and who it was last edited by and what their level of expertise is. For that reason, Wikipedia is usually especially discouraged by academia, which as an institution places emphasis on linking the authority of a piece with the person who wrote it.