History Luddites

The history faculty at Middlebury have banned Wikipedia. I think that is a bit odd.

Inside Higher Education, which is fast growing into the source of information on higher education news,had one person commenting “College students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias in their papers,” he said. “That’s not what college is about. They either should be using primary sources or serious secondary sources.”

Yet the Middlebury faculty singled out Wikipedia. As the commentator above said - serious scholarship requires serious tools - but to focus only on one of those derivative sources and to suggest that it is somehow inferior to other sources at its level is absurd. The obvious benefits of the WIKI format, including the ability to self correct and the significantly greater ability to cover a broad range of subjects should not be lost. One wonders how many of these professors have ever taken the professional responsibility to help edit a Wikipedia entry in their area of specialization.