John M and Captain K: thanks to you both for taking the time to read the excellent essays which I cited, plus the excerpts from my old user pages!

And tadvance, if you haven't read all this stuff, I hope you will do so! I know it's alot (and the essays I cited only take the story up to about mid 2006), but it's well worth your time, particularly if you ever use Wikipedia as an informational resource.

I feel that the essays I cited and my own essays actually represent the voice of moderation! I should perhaps have mentioned that many experienced Wikipedians have expressed agreement with many of the points I made within Wikipedia itself; see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_retention
(There are many other pages expressing dissent; look around).

If you want to see examples of former Wikipedians with "axes to grind", try http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/ (a site devoted among other things to ferreting out the IRL identities of Wikipedia "admins" who operate under "handles" rather than their real names, a project which raises troubling privacy issues), http://wikipediareview.com/ (to mention just one of many sites which frequently feature fairly rabid critism of the existing "power structure" at Wikipedia), or read Cade Metz's hilarious (and slightly scary) account of the bizzare saga of sometime Wikipedian Judd Bagley http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...and_overstock/
I must warn you: this stuff will probably make your eyes spin around in their sockets, but I trust it will blunt the unfortunate impression that I am too embittered to be able to offer sound advice on whether to use Wikipedia, and if so how.

01101001, good point, if I do say so myself--- yeah, I already made the same point, somewhere buried up above, but it bears repeating: if you feel you simply must cite Wikipedia, instead of linking to (for example) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein, you should always take a moment to click on "permanent link" under toolbox (look at the left hand sidebar) and link to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=205948697 which happens to be the current version as I write. Even better, click on "history" to try to ensure that you aren't linking to versions in the middle of an "edit war" with an anon vandal, which happens to be pretty common with this article, which happens to be the most read science-related page on Wikipedia (and I can prove that claim, if anyone is curious, since WP logs more than most people realize and makes almost all of the logs public, if you know how to access the information). Indeed, if you check you'll find that the version immediately previous to the version I just cited was a version with a typical "silly vandalism" (silly but annoying). Even better, click on "discussion" and look at the archives to get some sense of recurrent problems this article has experienced over the years. (A particularly abhorrent example is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al...tein/Archive_6). Somewhere in those archives you'll find the results of a small statistical study I carried out documenting one months worth of vandalism at this one article.

I cannot--- and do not--- expect that everyone will agree with all or any of the points I have tried to make above, but I think I can ask that anyone interested recognize that I have thought about this, that I have extensive experience at Wikipedia, and that if you know where to look, there is much thoughtful criticism of Wikipedia to be found.

Overall I encouraged by feedback so far, since I think we seem to mostly agree on my overall goal, which is not to get everyone to stop visiting Wikipedia at all, but rather to get BAUTians to try harder to say, whenever they link to a Wikipedia article, "BTW, if are not already aware of this, you should know that there are many complicated, subtle, and endemic quality control issues at Wikipedia, so you should always be very careful to read critically and keep a sharp eye out for suspect claims or possible slanting".

This is currently up to individual teachers, and their practices seem to vary widely. Some say they explicitly forbid Wikipedia (and in a tiny minority of schools that is even official policy); others say they think Wikipedia can and should replace printed textbooks. (I seem to have mislaid the link the printed transcript of a PBS program which examined how Wikipedia and other internet resources are changing the face of American education, but they interviewed some teachers who expressed this view--- which I find utterly shocking, as you can imagine.)

dgruss is a Chemistry teacher, and no doubt there are other teachers at BAUT--- I hope they will join the discussion!

In common with several commentors who responded, I tend to feel that the best response to Wikipedia is neither to ignore it, nor to forbit its use, but rather to reinstate the high school civics course as a mandatory element of universal public education, with a curriculum updated to focus on issues of technology and society. Wikipedia can then be used to provide innumerical examples of disinformation, clandestine agenda pushing, and so on. Taught well, such courses could and should produce a generation wise to the ways of spin. That would be good for many reasons beyond controlling the spread of woo. It would also make it much easier to casually cite some version of some Wikipedia article which appears at a glance to in fairly decent shape, secure in the expectation that most citizens will appreciate why readers of Wikipedia are either skeptical and critical readers, or else they are at risk of being manipulated and misled.

Uh, nowhere. Poor choice of words on my part (I just edited the post to which you were responding). Sorry!

To avoid possible misunderstanding: despite my brief attempt to place this discussion in a much broader pedagogical context (when I realized I was about to hijack my own thread, I deleted my outline of a possible curriculum for a modern civics course), throughout this discussion I am speaking about science and math articles. Yes, to repeat: it is a very common misunderstanding (VCM) to assume that "math articles in WP are almost entirely good" or that "mathcranks don't exist" or that "no-one would take the time to slant a math article to promote a hidden sociopolitical agenda". The world would be a better place, I suppose, if any of those assumptions were true but unfortunately, they are completely incorrect.

I sure hope you don't work at NASA or anywhere else where it is important that only correct mathematics be employed!

No doubt everyone here has heard of Citizendium, and probably knows that progress at this alternative has been very slow (I think they have perhaps a hundred articles a year after it was founded by Larry Sanger). Citizendium attempts to compete with Wikipedia head to head, but uses a system in which proposed edits to articles are moderated by "curators", which is intended to ensure fact checking, balance, and so on. One difficulty here lies in attracting expert authors (untainted by bitter controversies which could cloud judgement) and in attracting persons competent to administer what would be a vast enterprise, if Citizendium every really gets rolling.

One key element in my own response is that the wiki model (moderated or not) works better when the pool of authors/editors is fairly small and share common and well-defined goals. My feeling is that this is easiest to ensure if for example the mathematical professional organizations encourage ad hoc committees to set up small specialized wikis (with edits by invitation only, and only by tenured faculty at accredited universities) in, for example, "PDEs of mathematical physics", "Dynamical Systems", and so on.

Take a look at this specialized encyclopedia in the area of my formal academic training, dynamical systems:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/...amical_systems
It would be impossible to imagine a more stellar roster of authors! (No, I have nothing to do with this initiative, but I wish it well!)

My hope is that academics will generate many more specialized encyclopedias of quality comparable to the "Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems", which will then be "autoaggregated" (perhaps at the level of individual surfers using Greasemonkey, or perhaps at "one stop information" websites similar to Wikipedia) into a coherent whole by adding links from one vetted article to dozens of others. Even this would fall far short of Britannica style editorial oversight, but it would be infinitely preferable to the chaos of Wikipedia.

Another possibility might be government subsidies for Brittanica so that this becomes a free on-line encyclopedia while retaining its experienced staff of highly trained editors (genuine editors, not the Wikipedia caricature of that role). This would almost certainly be found to be politically unacceptable in the U.S., but it just might fly in Britain, after the model of the BBC.

These suggestions are not mutually incompatible; the first might lead to free on-line encyclopedias comparable to the printed version of the venerable Encyclopedia of Mathematics, while the second would make one of the most venerable traditional encyclopedias available on-line free to all.