As a student myself, I know that some teachers at my high school are vehemently anti-Wikipedia, and some won't let us use the site for research even if we don't cite it in our paper. They give us the obvious explanation of "Anyone can edit it, so it's unreliable". Then something occurred to me. Sure, most anyone can edit an article if they want, but that doesn't mean they are going to. Because you know you can edit Wikipedia, are you going to? What loser goes "Hahahaha! I'm going to spend three hours changing every major fact in this article!!!" only to have it reversed ten seconds later.
Teachers at my high school make it seem like Wikipedia is some unorganized social get-together of people who think they know something.
Tlogmer, your article should be standard reading for all teachers. Nice job.
When I was a teacher, I was vehemently anti-wikipedia. This was, however, largely because the areas I taught weren't technical and the 'facts' were much less important than the analysis of the writing. Or to put it another way, there are maybe a dozen - at most - commentators on Nietzsche who are worth reading. However there are literally thousands of ill-informed college students and graduates who have opinions on Nietzsche, all of which are, as a rule, extremely suspect. Hence, the wikipedia article on Nietzsche has little gems like this:
Nietzsche?s works remain controversial, and no real consensus exists on their meaning. The interpretation of his works seems shakier than the interpretative literature on most other major philosophers. One can readily identify some key concepts, but the meaning of each, let alone the relative significance of each, remains contested.
Which is patent nonsense. There are excellent treatments of Nietasche's work; Heideggar and Kaufman leap out as great examples.
Wikipedia also cites Morgan as authority for the proposition that 'most commentators consider Nietzsche an atheist'. To begin with, Morgan's text is 60-odd years old and Morgan is a minor, christian scholar with an obvious bias against Nietzsche's claims. It's a terrible authority for a position which is untenable; most rigorous contemporary scholarship posits that Nietzsche was a theist, though certainly an unconventional one.
These misconceptions exist because Nietzsche is a popular philosopher - there are lots of people with a non-academic, or not serious academic interest in his work - and there are not enough serious Nietzschean scholars to rectify the misconceptions; or at least they're not editing wikipedia. The great tragety is that, I suspect, an enormous number of undergrads taking introduction to philosophy courses are going to read that page and come away with some fundamental misunderstandings about Nietzschean philosophy.
And it's not just this topic; a few years ago I set a paper on Natural Law theory and had to fail half a dozen students whose research was heavily influenced by the wikipedia article as it, again, contained fundamental errors about the subject matter.
When it comes to Technical articles on Wikipedia's I assume, as a non-trained person that they're a relatively helpful overview of a topic. However, when I examine articles on subjects that require a high level of analytical ability - philosophy, literature - the articles are of a very poor standard.
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