Published on Clinamen (http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown)

Middlebury College History department bans citations of Wikipedia

By Jim Brown
Created Jan 31 2007 - 12:33pm

Inside Higher Ed reports [1] that History professors at Middlebury college are looking to ban students from citing Wikipedia. The policy actually sounds like a really sound one to me: students can use Wikipedia (though some professors wanted to ban all use, this was not enacted), they just can't cite it. As director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University Roy Rosenzweig notes, the problem isn't necessarily Wikipedia:

“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.”

I wonder if these same professors would back a ban of Britannica in history papers...I would.


Source URL:
http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown/jbrown/node/49