To Wikipedia or Not to Wikipedia?

Should students be allowed to cite wikipedia in their papers? Can wikipedia be a good classroom source? What should its purpose be?

I write about this question from the perspective, I think, of a distinct minority of professors. I think wikipedia is awesome and that its use should be encouraged. I know that I am in the minority, however, when even wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, objects to the citing of wikipedia as an academic source ("Wikipedia's Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation," Chronicle of Higher Education (12 June 2006)).

To me, the attitude of most professors against wikipedia boils down to a elitist need to maintain their academic authority and an entrenched notion of individual and property rights.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia to which anyone can add or delete information. It shares this format with open-source computer software and operating systems like linux. Your average Joe can go into a linux program at any time to change the code and make programs run better. Today, most people in the academy accept the notion that linux operating systems crash less and run more streamlined programs than Microsoft, with their veritable army of highly qualified programmers. This is simply because open sourcing is a better format. If something does not work or is not right, it can be changed by anyone. It logically follows that if this works for linux, it ought to work for wikipedia as well. So wikipedia is the ultimate peer-reviewed source. Rather than just having one or two peers review the data, literally tens of thousands of people can examine a text and change it as necessary.

If this is the case, then why are so many professors dead-set against using wikipedia? The answer is simple: elitist self-preservation. Professors are inculcated to believe in an established system in which terminal degrees like Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s and J.D. are supposed to give them a kind of higher authority to speak on topics than students or average people have. And perhaps some professors do have greater knowledge than most average people. But if professors dislike content on wikipedia or think that this content is inaccurate or unreliable, they're always welcome to go change it themselves. Why is this insufficient? Because terminal degrees do more than authorize knowledge; they actually operate as exclusive gatekeepers. Normal people aren't supposed to be able to speak on topics; they have to be excluded.

Professors also don't like wikipedia because it goes against the academic mentality of individual intellectual ownership. This mentality, whose roots can ultimately traced to an uncritical acceptance of capitalism, is that ideas are owned individually, and not collectively, and that students learn most effectively by writing down their "own" ideas or by culling ideas from "authoritative sources" with Ph.D.'s who write books that no one at all would read if professors didn't keep handing out these research assignments. This is the same mentality that allows Metallica to make millions of dollars while they criticize poor students for downloading their incoherent music and allows drug companies to charge $200 a bottle for needed medications for AIDS because they own the "patent" or the "trademark" even while people who can't afford the drugs die. Needless to say, this notion, that only individuals can create texts, is also Eurocentric. Many ancient philosophical works from the rest of the world were the product of many different authors.

Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't like students to turn in a paper that only contained footnotes from wikipedia. But that's simply because students should expose themselves to a variety of types, formats, and ideas in sources, and wikipedia is only one of many possible sources. But professors should think twice about what values they are trying to support before they ban the use of wikipedia in their classrooms.