In the wake of the Essjay controversy and a history department’s ban, Wikipedia’s founder has sought to restore credibility in the Web site in a well-established fashion. He set new policies and granted confidence-building interviews in national magazines.
Meanwhile, an ardent user has taken things into his own hands, which is how a collaborative enterprise is supposed to work anyway.
Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, has written a piece on The New Republic’s Web site that tries to inspire academics to join up. “Wikipedia is on our side,” he declared.
With publications like Encyclopaedia Britannica fighting “to retain control over the means of producing knowledge,” Mr. Rauchway argues that anyone who cares “about the free production and promulgation of information” has a duty to participate.
A BusinessWeek columnist also appeals to a personal sense of duty. Taking a long tour around the difficulty in solving credibility issues at the site, he eventually ends up blaming everyone.
Like it or not, it’s your responsibility and mine to monitor what’s being said about us online.
If motivation is what you need to start, look no further than Secrecy News, a blog from the Federation of American Scientists. It reports that Wikipedia “has steadily grown in popularity, credibility and influence to the point that it is now used and referenced in U.S. Government intelligence products.”
The Open Source Center, based at the C.I.A., has cited Wikipedia material in profiles of three key figures in South Asia, the blog says.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many professors at universities throughout the United States have recently adopted policies prohibiting Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, from being used as a primary source in reports.

Neil Walters, a history professor at Middlebury College claims that vandalism of Wikipedia was used as a source in reports submitted to him. 

Walters' department adopted a policy banning the use of Wikipedia as a primary source, while allowing it to be used for background information. Individual professors at other schools, including UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania, have taken up this policy.

Wikipedia contributors regularly review the articles, but with the English version of the site recently reaching 1 million articles, they can rarely take time to protect every entry against subtle vandalism.

Wikipedia's guidelines, and the statements of its founder, Jimmy Wales, have advised against using Wikipedia or other encyclopedias as a primary source.