Wikipedia: A menu, not a main course

History professors at Middlebury College recently prohibited using Wikipedia as a research source in tests & essays. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Waleslast year discouraged students from using Wikipedia--or any encyclopedia--as a reference for academic research.

The declaration has got scholars and other information professionals engaged in an interesting discussion about the best use of open-source content. How does this kind of information rate in the larger scheme of research? Can an open-source method be trusted to produce accurate, thorough, even-handed information?

Hackles are up and the debate is raging. Read on for a sampling.

Blog community response:

"I am not in favor of banning any source from student inquiry or citation--any form of censorship can quickly become a slippery slope that imperils the very notion of academic freedom. But I want my students to know that they are accountable for anything they cite, so they need to be rigorously aware of every source they consult, and they must engage in thoughtful, critical readings of those sources."
--Worshipping Paradise

"Wikipedia is great for organizing one's thoughts and to get an overall picture before delving into specific topics. Within seconds, one can get the gist of a subject and follow trails of inquiry from that subject to other related topics... Middlebury is doing the right thing. College students should be intellectually mature enough to not cite Wikipedia (or the dictionary, or the encyclopedia), in their papers. Faculty should be mature enough to see the value in Wikipedia."
--Constructitechnologeducationalism

"Wikipedia's official policy is that no article may contain information that isn't also published somewhere else. The correct response would be to follow the references cited in the Wikipedia article to the original source of the information. If no source is cited for a given piece of information, then it should not be assumed to be factual."
--Slashdot user Tyler Larson