I meant the history department. Before I get into why, let's first dispense with the obvious and oft-debated "reliability" question.

Wikipedia is "open source." Anyone can edit it. This is both bad and good as far as the encyclopedia's reliability as a source of information is concerned. For example, the other day Rob (my boss) opened the Wikipedia page for "Venus" (the planet) and noted that the first sentence was "Fuck you." Being a good netizen (and while not a planetary geologist, being fairly certain that “fuck you” was not an unbiased and true statement about the planet Venus), Rob went in and removed the sentence, and then checked the page's edit history to make sure there were no other errant "fuck yous" in the entry that he missed. So some 14-year old wrote a slur in the margin of his encyclopedia and Rob fixed it. The open source nature of the wiki allowed for both the abuse and the remedy. In practice, Wikipedia is highly self-correcting, with variations on this Venus story happening all the time (and by all accounts the time between erroneous edit and corrective fix is very brief). In this way, Wikipedia is actually far more reliable than most other non-open source web sites, but perhaps not as reliable as a vetted, peer-reviewed encyclopedia (though at least one study shows Wikipedia is about as accurate at the Encyclopedia Britannica).

Now let’s talk about the Middlebury decision. The problem with a blanket ban on Wikipedia has nothing to do with its relative reliability. Even the Wikimedia Foundation admits that using the wiki for academic purposes might be a bad idea. The main problem is it limits the individual instructor’s freedom to make a call like that for herself. Emily was considering taking a history of mathematics course at UVM this semester and she noted that in the description, the professor mentioned allowing one Wikipedia citation per paper. I don’t know the prof’s reasons for doing this, but perhaps the students were expected to write about contemporary mathematicians, about whom there may be precious little written in books and peer-reviewed journals. When I taught film production and digital editing at Burlington College, I tended to allow one web source for each paper because students were typically picking working filmmakers and editors as subjects (FWIW, my students usually chose an IMDb page as their web source rather than Wikipedia).

The other big problem with the Middlebury decision is that it arbitrarily singles out Wikipedia specifically. First of all, when I was in school it was generally frowned upon to use any encyclopedia as a cited source. If you’re going to ban Wikipedia, how about banning Britannica too? Secondly, the ban doesn’t say anything about all of the other questionable places on the net that students might include in their bibliographies. Why not just ban all WWW sources and make students use print-based sources and sources from peer-reviewed online journal databases exclusively?

Singling out Wikipedia in this way makes no sense and strikes me as a reactionary shot across the bow of the New Model, fired by curmudgeonly staunch adherents of the Old Model. It may be true that Wikipedia does not meet the rigorous standards of academia. If so, then at least make a policy that reflects reality. I think giving instructors guidelines about accepting online sources and then letting them set a citation policy for the individual class is a better way to go.