The Use of Wikipedia for Scholarly Resource

It’s incumbent upon any responsible research writer to not blindly accept a secondary source’s citations and references.  Even a newspaper reporter corroborates a story from at least two sources before going-to-print.  Some amount of quality assurance audit is to be expected as a researcher assembles a paper and cite sources.  (This could take the form of systematized random sampling, or checking the references from any suspect or lesser-known sources.)  This act of validation should be the gateway to the responsible use of Wikipedia as a reference-ready source.

That said, some influence upon Wikipedia to acknowledge the gap between what is widely-accepted as scholarly work and what is in the commonly-contributed content on their website could be addressed by a small designation on their articles denoting the ones that have earned a scholarly rating.  Authors of articles that posit that their work meets general academic standards could affix an icon (such as a diploma or mortar board or blue ribbon) to the article, giving researchers an added level of confidence that the article meets an higher standard.

Nonetheless, it is up to the research writer to know their sources and know their citations.  Added work, but no one ever said that research writing has to be made easier!