"On the other hand, I will never forgive myself for not copying a Wikipedia piece of long ago on Thomas Jefferson, one that proved conclusively that his ancestors came from New Zealand (I'm not making this up) and that one of the founding fathers thus...

I certainly agree that Wikipedia's use as a "research source" is inherently problematic because entries are not peer-reviewed, they are generally anonymous, and they can be changed almost at whim. I would not want any students to cite Wikipedia for...

A decade or so ago the history department here at Middlebury made the New York Times in a story about how it had "banned" Wikipedia. The trouble came when two of our East Asian historians received student papers referring to the Shimabara Rebellion...