You add links to Wikipedia in many of your answers. Since you’re obviously someone who strives to be well-informed, I’d like to ask advice on how to answer to people who go like, “You’re searching for information on WIKIPEDIA?”. It’s so easy to criticize it, but it’s still such a useful tool. I’ll be more careful if I’m searching for an academic paper, obviously, but some people are sooo skeptical that Wikipedia is invaded by strange people to the point they can’t bother to access it casually.

Ah, the old Wikipedia question. 

To begin with, context is key – if what I’m looking for is a brief explanation of a type of boat or the definition of the Romantic movement for an ask on Tumblr, the standards are obviously not the sam as they would be for an academic paper, as you say. 

Another key point is diversity of sources – as I tell my students when it comes to research papers, using Wikipedia to check a date or a figure is fine, the problem comes down to when you’re using Wikipedia (or any source really) exclusively, because you’re not really getting a ocmprehensive view of the topic from different angles. So I use Wikipedia, I use Google Scholar and Google Books, I use JSTOR, and of course my own knowledge base, to try to present a well-rounded answer to a question. 

The final key point is following the footnotes. Whether it’s Wikipedia or an academic article or a book, it’s important to find out where the information presented came from so that you can check things for yourself; likewise, when you present information, it’s important to tell your readers where it’s coming from whenever possible. This comes up more in my formal academic work than my ASOIAF stuff, but in the former, I try to cite original documents whenever possible and give a citation that’s comprehensive so that anyone who wants to know where I got a given idea can find the exact document themselves by going to that archive.