First, I wanted to point people to a forthcoming study that suggests that Wikipedia’s growth has slowed dramatically, and that the nature of its community is changing. (See this summary at New Scientist or this, more detailed one, at the project’s blog.) Research into wiki communities is fascinating stuff, and this paper will definitely be worth reading when the 2009 WikiSym proceedings are published.
And, second, any discussion of Wikipedia lets me repeat a point that teachers and students tend to forget all too often: The problem with Wikipedia as a source in, say, a first-year course, isn’t that it’s sometimes inaccurate or incomplete compared to other general encyclopedias. What source isn’t? The real problem used to be that you couldn’t reliably access the page in the state that your student accessed it. Or, you could, but it was a pain, because you’d have to sort through the change log, and who has time for that? It’s 4 in the morning, and the papers are due back by 9am.
Wikipedia thoughtfully introduced a feature a while back that, for my money, is its most underused feature: a permanent link to the current revision of any page. It’s always on the left-hand column, and it does exactly what the name suggests. If you–or your students–are really lazy, you can click the “Cite this page” link right underneath it and get full bibliographic information, plus citations in a variety of formats, ready for copy-and-paste. Beneath the jump, I’ve posted a screenshot with the super-double-top-secret location of these features.
[Screenshot powered by Skitch]
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