Contrary to some of the replies your comment has received, I agree that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and it is not a place of first publication for new research findings. That's what Wikipedia is, because that's what Wikipedia says it is,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not

This is consistent with everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is, as you point out in your further replies to comments.

Indeed an expert in some subject should spend time building up primary and secondary sources, and leave compiling useful reference works like encyclopedias to people with editorial experience who are familiar with the good secondary sources on various subjects. But of course one problem with Wikipedia today is that volunteer editors of Wikipedia ("Wikipedians") are not selected, and by the way the project is mob-managed basically CANNOT be selected, for their editorial experience and familiarity with secondary sources. My first attempt to contribute to the Wikipedia project was to post some source lists (what a librarian might call "pathfinders") in user space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

and post links to those in article talk space so that editors could refer to good-quality secondary sources as they revised articles on controversial subjects. I can't say that those source lists haven't been used at all, but I can view the page access statistics for those source lists, and they are certainly underused by other Wikipedians. Meanwhile, there are whole broad topics on Wikipedia that are frequently subject to edit wars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

with sockpuppets and meat puppets continually reappearing to push fringe points of view. There is no sustained management response to this, despite the desire of the Wikimedia Foundation to improve content quality.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...

After edit: I had earlier posted the same article that was submitted to open this Hacker News thread on my Facebook wall, and one commenter there recalled his experiences trying to correct blatant factual errors on Wikipedia, which eventually led him to the Lamest Edit Wars page in Wikipedia project space,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME

where one has to laugh to avoid crying.