On Wikipedia

I posted this in my Psychology class in response to the Professor discrediting Wikipedia as a source.

"It's interesting that this has come up. I have had this debate in every class I have had since Wikipedia was founded. In its early days, anyone could edit an article on wikipedia. This lead to many factual errors. In the last few years, however, Wikipedia's community has developed a strict set of rules that should apply to any reference material. There is far more oversight and citation required for Wikipedia than any encyclopedia I have ever heard of. Certainly, the bias against Wikipedia by Academia is without merit at this point and begs the question: Why do they have a problem with easily accessed information?

If you go to Wikipedia, you will find every article has a list of source material. Without this citation, the article does not get published. If an article's bias is called into question, it is noted on the article and is subject to review by the community. Certainly, no other source will tell you that it is biased. I doubt any professor would admit a bias against Wikipedia or have a logical argument to back up their attempt to discredit it as a source.

To be honest, I will probably use Wikipedia. I probably won't use the online library. In my experience, Wikipedia is far more efficient at information gathering than university library systems. And time is money.

I am not posting this to be argumentative. This is not the first time I have experienced Wikipedia bias in a classroom. I understand that crowd-sourced information is a scary prospect to academics and universities that have controlled information for so long. I just can not stand to be a silent party to it."

I considered going into the fact that Wikipedia is free and Professors write the books and articles that are deemed "acceptable" and university libraries are incomplete, but I'll save that for the inevitable email conversation with my professor.