Some course makes extensive use of Wikipedia articles as learning resources to help frame ideas and discussions. They do this because Wikipedia provides quick and digestible overviews of many topics that are discussed here. Rather than paraphrase such overviews, some of which you may already know or that may be irrelevant to your needs, we think it is more sensible to send you to a source that has been edited by many individuals and is therefore likely to be reasonably clear and reliable.
However, you should never rely solely on Wikipedia as an information source. We like it because it is a great way to get the general gist of many topics, but it is not always 100% reliable and, more significantly, it does not go into any significant depth on anything. It also has a tendency to gloss over big intellectual debates and differences, almost never has anything new to say on academic issues, and sometimes misses important and relevant issues. Where we think you would gain a lot from exploring further, we provide links to other sources, often to academic papers. However, we strongly encourage you to explore further links and references yourself. You might find these within Wikipedia articles, or you might search for topics that suggest themselves in Wikipedia in more diverse places, especially scholarly articles such as those that can usually be found through Google Scholar or Microsoft’s rather less well-developed Microsoft Academic. Remember the mantra “Wikipedia is a great place to start and a terrible place to finish.”
Please note that Wikipedia is a great learning tool and can be very useful as a starting point for research, but it is not a good source to cite. This is not a properly peer-reviewed source, provides too little detail, and it cannot be called upon to provide reliable evidence to back up your own arguments and discussions. In your own work, please do not use Wikipedia articles as referenced resources. Indeed, you should avoid citing any encyclopaedia or dictionary at all, for much the same reasons. This includes Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Updated May 04 2018 by FST Course Production Staff