> Wikipedia (whose reputation in academia for being inaccurate I don't accept as fair or accurate) Neither did I, until I started studying aculeates in detail.

> Wikipedia (whose reputation in academia for being inaccurate I don't accept as fair or accurate) Neither did I, until I started studying aculeates in detail. Only a few polistid species are even described in Wikipedia, and for the most part their pages share identical content that appears to have been copy-pasted and which, while a reasonable general description of polistid social behavior and colony cycle overall, totally fails to describe heterospecific variations which can be fairly easily found in papers which treat individual species in detail. For a general lay overview such as an encyclopedia is meant to provide, sure, it's accurate enough. But - given that even an interested amateur like me can not only soon exhaust Wikipedia's treatment of the subject, but almost as quickly also become aware of that treatment's shortcomings - I no longer have any difficulty understanding why it's so negatively regarded as an academic reference. On reflection, I don't understand why this should be controversial. When is any encyclopedia expected to be able to serve in this role? The genre is, as I mentioned, intended to provide a lay overview of many subjects; its treatments are thus broad and shallow by deliberate design.