Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,

(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)

That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.

   It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors.

That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.

There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.

IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.

It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).

But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.

Maybe they're warming to the idea now.

Well, for academic purposes, it still is.

But then again, as then, it's still used for those purposes now, despite the policy.

I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)

OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.

I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.

Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!

Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.) Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.) Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.) Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.) Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.) ...and so on...

Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.

It's a fair question. Here's what I could find from 2005 ...

"The One for All model has delivered solid results in a remarkably short time" http://www.wired.com/2005/03/wiki/

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_pr...

If you read the history of ubiquitous technologies that we take for granted, you'll see the same attitude repeated. The car, plane, radio, television, light bulb, the UN, etc. you'd have to look at the really early form of these things.