Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, told educators last year that students shouldn’t cite his sprawling Web site: “For God’s sake, you’re in college,” he said. “Don’t cite the encyclopedia.”
It’s a safe bet that most professors agreed with that assessment. But according to BBC News, Mr. Wales has now modified his message. He told attendees at a London IT conference this week that he doesn’t object to Wikipedia citations, although he admitted that scholars would “probably be better off doing their own research.”
From the BBC report, it’s hard to tell how gung-ho Mr. Wales is about Wikipedia’s academic value. But the online encyclopedia’s efforts to improve the quality of its articles might be starting to pay dividends: A German magazine recently compared 50 Wikipedia articles with similar pieces in Brockhaus, a commercial encyclopedia. According to the study, the Wikipedia articles were generally more informative. —Brock Read
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