Good research can use Wikipedia, but only as a starting point. Good research MUST use the primary sources.
Below, bad 'research' demonstrates how *relying* on Wikipedia as final arbiter of one's knowledge guarantees public humiliation.
"Chaos theory is often cited as an explanation for the difficulty of predicting weather and other complex phenomena. Roughly, chaos theory shows that small changes in local conditions can cause major changes in global, long-term behavior in a wide range of "well-behaved" systems, such as the weather. In an oft-cited example, the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina can (eventurally) cause worldwide changes in the weather. There is a sense in which this is true: if we knew *all* the values for *all* the relevant variables worldwide, al la Laplace (see Singer, 1959), we could predict the weather indefinitely far into the future. With such a model we could determine the long-term weather pattern with and without the flapping of the butterfly's wings. We would see that the two weather patterns would eventually diverge to a point of no correlation.
This explanation ignores important factors in real weather prediction. Because meteorologists do *not* know the values of all the relevant variables, they do not work at a level of detail, or over time spans, in which chaos would be relevant." (John H. Holland, 'Emergence' pages 43-44)
NOR DO CLIMATOLOGISTS.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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