The Guardian Unlimited has a story about an International Relations professor who has seen the light on Wikipedia. She's assigning students Wikipedia entries on Middle Eastern politics and having them contribute to the discussion:

Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations, said she used to be "one of the disgruntled crown of academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays" but is now convinced it can be a great opportunity for students to see at first hand how knowledge is produced.

As this professor notes, Wikipedia is a useful site of knowledge production. If we read it merely as a site of knowledge consumption we are 1) ignoring that all knowledge is produced by reader/writers; 2) chopping off half of what Wikipedia does and limiting its usefulness.

Inside Higher Ed reports 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.