From Wikipedia's General Disclaimer :
"WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY"
and from their "Researching with Wikipedia":
- Always be wary of any one single source, or of multiple works that derive from a single source.
- Where articles have references to external sources (whether online or not) read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says.
- In all academic institutions, Wikipedia, along with most encyclopedias, is unacceptable as a major source for a research paper. Other encyclopedias, such as Britannica, have notable authors working for them and may be cited as a secondary source in most cases. For example, Cornell University has a guide on how to cite encyclopedias.
Finally from a response to a refdesk email last spring:
Wikipedia is a convenient place to get general info, but the site carries a warning that it is not an acceptable source to cite in a college research paper. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
In addition, I know several faculty that would refuse to accept a paper that cites Wikipedia.
Happily, we have easy access to a number of resources that you can use to verify the info from Wikipedia, and would be suitable for citation.
Encyclopedia Britannica is listed among our online encyclopedias
http://www.oswego.edu/library/resources/reference.html#encyclopedias
And Biography Reference Bank includes a number of online articles about Rosa Parks
http://www.oswego.edu/library/resources/reference.html#bi
