Wikipedia: Yes, it is a good (pre)research tool

I'm going to talk about the importance of pre-research today.
In order to conduct a good search to get the information you need for your reports, papers, tests, personal edification, etc., you need to know a little about the topic first. If you know absolutely nothing, as often happens when you're researching a completely new subject, you'll have difficulty in performing a useful search. If you search on a topic you don't know anything about you're going to get a lot of results and still have no idea which ones are useful. For example, before coming to work in a nursing school library I didn't know the difference between a PN and a RN. What do they do and what level of education is required? And is a LPN the same thing as a PN? (Yes, apparently.)
The thing is, to create a good, on target search in whatever database you choose you need to put the correct words together in order to narrow down the results to exactly what you need. To do this you need to have a general idea of the topic and the key terms associated with it. In other words, pre-research.

Wikipedia is a great place to start if you know little to nothing about something. All the regular disclaimers for Wikipedia apply; it can be unreliable, information changes suddenly, it can be biased, people vandalize articles, etc. However, most of the basic facts are correct and there are often reliable references and links at the bottom of the page. You can use this resource to provide you with the starting terms you need to perform a database search that doesn't get you 5,000+ results.

The main page has a search box in the top right corner where you can enter your search term. It will try to anticipate what you are looking for and give you suggestions so if you're not sure of the correct term you can start typing and choose from the results.

Click to see full size picture.

The site uses a kind of controlled vocabulary. That means that out of all the various terms that could be used for a subject, one has been chosen as the entry title. Other terms that might be used are redirected to that one title. If you type in "mice" you will be redirected to the page for "mouse".
If the term you choose has more than one meaning you might be taken to a disambiguation page. This page will list all the various articles associated with that term. Try looking up the term "PC" or "Pill" to see what you get.
A main page will give you the option of going to the disambiguation page if you get redirected to the wrong topic.

The disambiguation link will take you to a page listing all uses of the term nursing.

The word nursing can be used for different things but can only be assigned to one entry.

 The article will start with a paragraph to introduce the topic. After that comes the table of contents. This breaks the subject down into its various subheadings. If a section is written about at length in another article there will be a link to it under the section heading.

At the end of the article there is often a See Also section which will give you a list of related articles.
The sections you really want are the next ones. These are: References, Further Reading, and External Links. Here there are citations for articles, books, and websites where you can generally find more reliable information.

There's also a picture of Florence Nightingale in her little bonnet there.

This is the most useful section.

Below these you will sometimes find an outline of the topic with links to other Wikipedia articles. This is similar to the See Also section, only generally containing main topics. At the very bottom of the page are the categories the topic has been assigned to. You can click on the Nursing category and see a list of all the different pages that have something to do with that topic.

So, what should you take from all of this? Look over the article and decide which terms seem most important in connection to your topic. Are there any dates, people, or places that look useful? Write these words down and use them in your searches. Words are important. Some people ask for an aspirin while meaning any painkiller available, some people may ask instead for aacetylsalicylic acid, and others may ask for an ibuprofen while specifically meaning Advil. To get the results you need from a search, you need the right words. Wikipedia can often provide them.

The important thing to remember about Wikipedia is, of course, the fact that it can be edited by anyone. Many of the articles are reviewed by people who want to make sure the content is correct but they don't always have the credentials to do that. Other people edit articles so that they can add their own personal bias, making a subject look the way they want it to look without presenting the other side. This just means that you should take the information you find there with a grain of salt and then look for more reliable sources to confirm or refute what you found.

(I didn't look at Wikipedia for information on the RN/LPN question. I looked at Fundamentals of Nursing: The Art and Science of Nursing Care, 7th edition by Taylor. I knew that the information I was looking for was pretty basic and as such would be in a fundamentals book on the subject. This edition was published this year and has the most up-to-date information. I also had a good idea that something so necessary to understanding the subject of nursing would be in the very front of the book. I checked the table of contents for this. Chapter 1, Educational Preparation for Nursing seemed a likely place and voila! That's where the information was. If you want to find something, analyze it and you can figure out where to look.)