Google and Wikipedia as credible Research tools

I have always been taught that you should never do research on Wikipedia and you really shouldn't do a google search either. I was required to only search for scholarly articles or specific websites deemed credible by my teachers and professors. I was blown away by the amount of credible information there is on wikipedia and how quickly information can be found knowing your way around google.

I can't help but think how much easier of a time I would have had writing research papers, and how much more fun it would have been, if I had known about how powerful of tool google really is. I would spend hours sifting through journals and reports that were either irrelevant or just hard to get though when I could have gotten straight to the source by using google newspapers. Or seen search results that were only from certain types of sites by using site:. How many hours would I have saved if I had only known what google could do.

And if I had been allowed to use Wikipedia? Wow! That place is amazing. There is information there about almost everything consolidated into a neat little article. And if you want more information? Hundreds of sources at the bottom of the page. I can't remember a single scholarly article, or textbook, that cited as many sources as some of the wikipedia pages I saw today. I also had no idea that there was a rubric to determine if a page was credible and people reviewing the information to make sure that it was credible. Professors only wanted peer-reviewed research articles as sources but it seems to me that wikipedia fits that criteria pretty well.