A Major Rant

I can't really think of a proper title for this rant. Bear with me while I let off steam.

Firstly, about banning Wikipedia from being cited in research papers. While even I, a devoted and extreme Wikipediholic, admit that Wikipedia content may not always be fully accurate, Britannica isn't fully accurate either, but it isn't usually banned. Besides, comparison with other encyclopedias is besides the point. Students with even a tiny little bit of research skills should know that checking just one source is or should be proscribed for good reasons. Students who get an assignment, go home, lazily switch on the computer and copy a paragraph or two off Wikipedia deserve to get a failing grade if the information turns out to be inaccurate. Is it really that difficult to search in Google, for goodness' sake? If such students then turn to educators and whine, "But I got it off Wikipedia!", well, who's to blame? Wikipedia for being inaccurate? Educators for not banning it? The students, for goodness' sake. The students for being too lazy to check more than one source that isn't a Wikipedia mirror. Educators taking this issue into their own hands instead of letting students who can't be bothered to do a Google search suffer the consequences just encourages research irresponsibility and laziness, the very laziness many of these aforementioned educators are complaining about in the first place. Is it really that difficult to trust students to do their own research?
Besides, even though many students prohibited from citing Wikipedia in research papers shouldn't be citing encyclopedias at all instead of primary and secondary sources, what on earth is wrong with using them as a tool to gain understanding of a topic before doing more in-depth research? Plunging into assignments shows enthusiasm but can be unhelpful or even misleading if students still lack fundamental knowledge of a topic. So where do they get this fundamental knowledge? Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, of course!
Secondly, anti-Wikipedians often demonstrate an utter lack of any type of corroboration so deep it's tempting to ask if they've ever heard of research. Take this example from a forum:

the wikipedia is people make up stories one la.

Well, well. If this person had checked more than ONE entry on Wikipedia WITHOUT that ridiculous anti-wiki bias, he/she would realise that no, the majority of entries on Wikipedia do not consist of people making up stories. It's hilarious, really, when one disentangles oneself from the issue, to see how some anti-Wikipedians delude themselves in such a blatant manner.
Thirdly, why do people gripe so much about Wikipedia's accuracy when if they had bothered to do a tiny little bit of research, they would have found that far from being the spotless picture of perfection many imagine it to be Britannica, what many people consider to be the epitome of accuracy (as opposed to Wikipedia, *tsk tsk*), contains (gasp) errors too, which nobody at all seems to be complaining about? They're obviously just unnerved by the idea of "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit", so in their misguided eagerness to support their fundamentally flawed point of view they make foundationally imperfect and even blatantly erroneous comparisons that nobody has bothered to investigate. Oh, well. It's what happens when people are so opposed to any hint of change they prize stagnancy despite its obvious flaws.

Hot Off the Press

Wikipedia is also known for its incredibly quick updates. Since anyone can edit it, it often gets news before anywhere else does and fellow Wikipedians can then log on to the site and get the information hot off the press. For example, the 7 July 2005 London bombings apparently had a Wikipedia article just fourteen minutes after they were perpetrated. Soon, with editors using a special Wikipedia feature that gives a list of new articles buzzing around the article, it became more comprehensive than media coverage of the event: a powerful testimony to the power of Wikipedia.
Being a wiki, something that flies in the face of traditional encyclopedia wisdom and that has even led some to criticise it as not being an encyclopedia at all, gives Wikipedia an edge given to no other traditional encyclopedias: it is incredibly dynamic. Anything on the Internet can be dynamic if the editor edits the site now and then, but that would move incredibly slowly since there is a limit to what one person can do, and if that person is not at the scene when something relevant to the site happens, the site will fall behind. With Wikipedia, however, the update speed and fluidity is unprecedented. It does not have manpower constraints: with nearly eight million editors in 253 languages, Wikipedia can be updated by anybody who happens to be nearby when something happens, leading to such phenomena as the bombings article. Such things will never happen with more traditional encyclopedias, online or offline, and even when they are next updated the incident may be declared non-notable and left out of the encyclopedia. Notability criteria on Wikipedia tend to be extremely different from those of other encyclopedias, since Wikipedia, though decidedly not an indiscriminate collection of information (see this article) does not face the same size constraints as paper encyclopedias and can therefore include much more information. It's the definitive example (or at least one of the definitive examples) of a Web 2.0 site.

Quality, Not Quantity

How accurate is Wikipedia content? Pretty accurate, actually. A study by the scientific journal Nature shows that Wikipedia content is nearly as accurate as Britannica's, with only one more error per article. In fact, by the time the study was published, the Wikipedia errors were corrected, while Britannica will have to wait for its next print run. Britannica has since disputed the results of the study, but Nature has made a reply, a key point in which was that the reviewers did not know where the material they were reviewing came from, Wikipedia or Britannica, so whatever mistakes Britannica alleges they made will have affected Wikipedia's error count as well as Britannica's.
The problem is that people who criticise Wikipedia's fundamental concept for a lack of reliability make a crucial false assumption. They look at Wikipedia and say, "Eight million people typing gibberish on their laptops - how accurate can it be?" But Wikipedians generally don't type gibberish into Wikipedia. They contribute meaningful and sometimes excellent content in good faith, all the while cooperating with fellow editors working towards the common goal of making sure the Wikipedia of tomorrow is better than that of today. A 2002 study by IBM showed that Wikipedia vandalism is generally removed within five minutes, and even though Wikipedia has grown considerably since that year and there is no published data corroborating that expectation, vandalism on high-profile pages (which are viewed the most, after all) can be reverted within seconds. Vandals can blank the page and replace it with random characters only to find that after they click "save page" and their computer has finished its agonisingly slow load the vandalism is gone and the article is back to normal. The very openness that opens Wikipedia to bad-faith edits also ensures these are fixed quickly, while offering lots of benefits besides.

Wikipedia: An Overview

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was founded on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and as some would say, it has been all uphill from there. From humble beginnings as a small online encyclopedia with a tiny group of devoted users, Wikipedia has since blossomed into the world's largest online encyclopedia with over 1.8 million articles in the English language alone. In keeping with the founder's vision of providing free access to the sum of human knowledge to every single person on the planet, Wikipedia also boasts a full 253 languages, with a varying number of articles.
What is the secret of Wikipedia's success? Wikipedia is a wiki, a site that anyone can edit. Making use of the power of open collaboration or the wisdom of crowds, Wikipedia defies traditional encyclopedia wisdom, or what some would call the very essence of encyclopedia-ness. After all, encyclopedias are traditionally written by groups of experts, whereas Wikipedia is written by millions of users, some experts, most amateurs. Yet in doing so, Wikipedia has become the largest encyclopedia on the Internet, so it obviously isn't a problem in this regard. With respect to quality, it is also generally excellent.