Jake Young is a 
Lazy Middlebury students have lost a valuable resource:
Middlebury College history students are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia in preparing class papers.The school's history department recently adopted a policy that says it's OK to consult the popular online encyclopedia, but that it can't be cited as an authoritative source by students.
The policy says, in part, "Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source."
History professor Neil Waters says Wikipedia is an ideal place to start research but an unacceptable way to end it.
Here is my thing. I don't know if I think that Wikipedia is less accurate than your average encyclopedia. However, I don't think that college students should be citing encyclopedias either.
When you are in college, you need to start citing primary sources. Wikipedia can be helpful when taken with a grain of salt, but it isn't a primary source.
I guess I think that they might as well prohibit all predigested sources -- not just Wikipedia.
Comments
I think Stephen Colbert has taught this lesson very well.
Wikiality is not just a word, and elephants never forget.
Posted by: J-Dog | February 16, 2007 11:07 AM
Funny, I don't even think that any encyclopedia was acceptable as a source even in my high school days. Do universities allow the use of encyclopedias for anything? I don't see any problem holding Wikipedia to the same standard.
Posted by: ukko | February 16, 2007 11:08 AM
Nearly anything you might cite an encyclopedia for is going to be considered "common knowledge" and therefore does not need to be cited.
Posted by: Dave Munger | February 16, 2007 11:12 AM
I think primary sources are generally the way to go in college, but this isn't always possible and I don't see why carefully edited works like the Encyclopedia Britannica would be objectionable.
As for how accurate Wikipedia is, this called to mind AJ Jacobs wiki-experiment for Esquire. In 2005, Jacobs posted a consciously inaccurate entry on Wikipedia in order to test how effective the community would be in correcting his errors. Apparently, "Every factual error was corrected within minutes, and the focus moved on to refinement, clarification and making the article more readable."
I'm not arguing that Wikipedia is idiot-proof, but I do think it deserves more credit than it generally receives.
Posted by: Neurontic | February 16, 2007 12:49 PM
I take second place to no man in my contempt for the neurotic paranoid foaming wiki-haters who seem so bent out of shape by its existence, but I think the professor has hit just the right tone: wikipedia is a great place to start your research, just as long as you use it to take you to your primary sources.
So I don't think it's right to say those students have lost a resource. They still have it, they just don't have the option of being lazy and stopping where they started.
Posted by: derek | February 16, 2007 2:05 PM
Speaking as a librarian who sees the value of both paper and electronic resources, I'm delighted to see this happen. As was said, the wikipedia is an excellent place to start...but it shouldn't be your major resource.
Posted by: Sam the librarian | February 16, 2007 3:27 PM
I'm also a librarian, in a university library. My principal task is supporting undergraduate research. By the time they're working on capstone projects, they ought to know better than to cite any encyclopedia, but sometimes they need to be reminded. Encyclopedias are tertiary resources.
Some faculty will allow students to use Wikipedia as a starting point. Some Wikipedia articles are very well cited, and if students then locate those citations, especially if they're scholarly, who cares where they found them?
The broader issue is that faculty who won't allow Wikipedia to be used in this manner often won't allow use of Internet resources at all, but in an increasing number of cases this is the only feasible way for a student at a small institution to get certain kinds of information (especially government publications and open access journals). It's better overall if I can teach them how to critically evaluate sources; then they see for themselves why citing Wikipedia would be a bad idea. Hopefully.
I won't get into faculty who can't tell the difference between an online subscription to a referreed journal and www.stuffimadeuponthespot.com.
Posted by: Genevieve Williams | February 16, 2007 5:21 PM
I agree with the ruling, not only for the reasons cited above, but because Wikipedia is not stable! With a conventional website or even most blogs, there's at least a social expectation that posted articles will remain more or less "as is", perhaps after some initial editing. With Wikipedia, you have no real assurance that any given article will say the same thing next week. Let alone the issue of:
"Does Wikipedia really say that?"
<typetypetype> "It does now!"
Posted by: David Harmon | February 16, 2007 6:28 PM
But we lazy bloggers can still link to the Wikipedia entry rather than Google up a better reference, right?
Posted by: Agnostic | February 16, 2007 8:18 PM
I agree with Genevieve. Despite the ruling, it will still be a great starting point. It serves to locate primary sources, and also just for general orientation - like when you stuble across something in the process and need one paragraph telling you what it is. I think it will still be part of both casual and academic research, it will just play a less formal role, which is probably good.
Posted by: jeffk | February 17, 2007 11:09 AM