Why wouldn't you be able to cite Wikipedia, as long as you specify the date on which you read it? The assumption that it's unreliable doesn't seem to be rooted in any genuine data, especially as I remember teachers and lecturers asserting that immediately the moment it appeared, based on nothing more than "but anyone can edit it!". One might think that was a bit early to leap to conclusions about quality.
It looks a lot like an attempt to preserve the academic culture of all claims being attached to names for reputation and career building reasons.
> It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all
Obviously. Any claim eventually has to bottom out at either personal experience, or citation of someone else's words. If you just follow the citations to the end you'll end up at a paper that just asserts something without a citation, and that's fine. Academics assume such statements must be reliable because of the institutional affiliation of the authors, but that's hardly a strong basis. Wikipedia does at least have a working system for fixing mistakes that isn't "spend two years arguing with a journal editor to get nothing more than an expression of concern at the top".
It looks a lot like an attempt to preserve the academic culture of all claims being attached to names for reputation and career building reasons.
> It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all
Obviously. Any claim eventually has to bottom out at either personal experience, or citation of someone else's words. If you just follow the citations to the end you'll end up at a paper that just asserts something without a citation, and that's fine. Academics assume such statements must be reliable because of the institutional affiliation of the authors, but that's hardly a strong basis. Wikipedia does at least have a working system for fixing mistakes that isn't "spend two years arguing with a journal editor to get nothing more than an expression of concern at the top".