If you try using Wikipedia as a research aid in almost any field and try to follow footnotes a lot of the time you will wind up with broken links or a garbage s

If you try using Wikipedia as a research aid in almost any field and try to follow footnotes a lot of the time you will wind up with broken links or a garbage source. It's not that there are not some Wikipedia pages that are not good. It is the case that it's very challenging to tell when a page is good or bad without following the footnotes. Sometimes you will find a good source, but at least in my experience most of the time you will try to follow citations and see it ends in either 404 or a trash pit. There are also lots of situations like if you are looking for things such as statistics related to a war, if you use Wikipedia to start your research you will wind up clicking through to all kinds of trash sources that waste your time when there are compendiums of statistics through either government reports or print references that you could have just used with library access in a fraction of the time that you spent sifting through a sea of web feces.