Education Issues:
User-Driven Academics

That students should strive for original and well-documented written work is an unquestioned maxim of higher education. Where an emerging secondary source like Wikipedia fits into that academic tradition is less certain. When the Department of History at Middlebury College in Vermont kicked off this semester with a ban on citing the user-driven encyclopedia, it was taking an obvious step toward clarification.

Stopping students from citing the online encyclopedia isn’t censorship or old-fashioned—it’s a reasonable condition for producing college-level work. It doesn’t matter if it’s history or biochemistry: Original academic work, by its very nature, demands the use of more than just secondary sources.

With the resources of the nation’s fourth-largest library, it’s hard for UC Berkeley students to justify citing Wikipedia. It seems ridiculous to list someone else’s version of history in a footnote when you have the opportunity to turn the pages of a book bound in human skin.

Of course, not everybody has access to massive libraries and students at smaller colleges such as Middlebury can be at a particular disadvantage. But Wikipedia is not the only Internet source to expand in recent years—online databases cataloging massive collections of primary sources are now regular feature of the college academic experience. Even Web sites available to the public, such as the Library of Congress’s American Memory project, leave computer-bound students increasingly without excuses to not produce original research.

The fact is, Middlebury was not “banning” Wikipedia or preventing students from accessing the Web site on the campus network. A statement from the history department acknowledged the online encyclopedia as “extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful”. The purpose of the citation rule is to counteract factual errors on the Web site, not to block the spread of knowledge. After all, that wouldn’t be very academic.