More on Wikipedia and the academy

by Alex

IHE has a short piece today on “Middlebury’s banning students from using Wikipedia”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki. The article is interesting, but what is especially valuable to me (and the paper on Wikipedia that I wrote) are the comments it generated, which provide a nice slice of quotable academic opinions about Wikipedia. As someone who has contributed a lot to Wikipedia I have a soft spot for it, but at the same time I have the sort of knowledge of its limits that can only come from, well, contributing to it. And of course its very embarrassing when students hand in papers to me that have been plagiarized from my own Wikipedia articles. I’ve been following the development of Citizendium (the other alternative)pretty closely now for some time, but as far as I can tell its not quite ready for prime time (or world-readable either).