Well if you’re tutoring somebody and don’t know an answer to something, what’s wrong with using Wikipedia as a springboard for answer-finding?
Wooooo! I’m wiki-ing like a motherfuck!
thanks for that link! I had tried to call my Congressman’s office but the phone message said they were “in staff training” until next week. Wankers.
People defending your liberty can be such a hassle.
Bunker Hill cattle rancher: “Hey! Who’s going to clean this up!”
Because if you’re tutoring someone in (I presume) an academic environment, you should have access to academic searches - from JSTOR onwards. Hell, Google Scholar, even.
I’m not dissing Wikipedia searches for non-academic stuff (like messageboard citations 
) but that’s not what I got from the context - “referencing for my tutoring work” to me meant “citing in the notes for a tutorial”. For that, I expect paper refs and journal cites, not Wikipedia. If the meaning is “look stuff up while actually taking a tut”, that’s different, and I’m cool with that.
I sure didn’t have any access to any of that stuff in high school, let alone anything lower than that. And my community college only had a few, as opposed to my university which had several. But if you didn’t yourself go to the university, you weren’t supposed to use it.
While I’ve never had access to both Wikipedia and these other searches at the same time, I think I would use Wikipedia first for an overview, if just because it’s laid out better: articles are under subjects, rather than having to do a blind search. I’d then learn the best terms to search for, and also look at any citations to legitimate scholarly works that I could then branch out from.
It’s the same way I used to use print encyclopedias.
BTW, the only thing I agree with the OP about is that they use way too many banners, with tiny X that don’t always close right, taking you off the page.