Wikipedia; good or bad?

In my opinion, every high school graduate would have at least one thing in common, that one thing would be a lecture from an English teacher telling them the dangers of using Wikipedia as a source. I was once told “Anyone could have posted that!”, as my teacher scolded me in my freshman English class as if I was once again a fifth grader. Today I know where my instructor was coming from; she was simply trying to prepare me for college.

Wikipedia, in my opinion is not a source that should be used for scholarly papers, primarily because it is true that anyone can change the information on the page. However, if you are assigned a specific topic to write on and you have no idea what it means or what it is, then using Wikipedia would be a good idea to get an overview for yourself on your topic. Wikipedia has it’s pros and cons, but overall I do believe it is a good source for an overview, therefore offering more positives rather than negatives.