Excerpt from Teaching Students How to Use Wikipedia as a Tool for Research - Edutopia

Wikipedia has evolved over time.   It "has moved far beyond its initial limitations, and is a helpful—and reputable—source for conducting research...Wikipedia articles are designed to introduce researchers to topics, not to be the final point of research...Claims in a Wikipedia article must be anchored to already existing sources."

This enables users to gather initial background information about a topic and verify the content in the Wikipedia articles before continuing their research in other resources such as books and journal articles.