it's kind of all libraries all the time around here

I just read the number one most e-mailed article on nytimes.com, which is about how the history department at Middlebury is banning the citation of Wikipedia, both in papers and tests. My librarian brain reacts to this by thinking, hello, information literacy! The department is missing a huge opportunity to teach kids about authority, reliability, etc., etc.--all the good things a reference librarian could come in and talk about.

I went to a talk yesterday by one of the candidates for the ALA presidency, the university librarian at the University of Richmond. He said that someone had described Wikipedia as "good when it's good and bad when it's bad." He noted that the page for hurricanes was something any other encyclopedia would be glad to have, but the page for the author Ian McEwan was shamefully tabloidesque. I personally use Wikipedia if I just want to get an idea about a topic; then I move on to other sources that I know have gone through a reasonably stringent review process to get information that I personally consider more reliable. I also love Wikipedia for finding general information when I just want a quick summary for my own edification. I know that there is a lot of good info on Wikipedia, but I am not comfortable enough with it to see it as a really reliable source of information.

I think a lot of people really do not know what Wikipedia even is. I can recall hearing people who were surprised to find out it was user-contributed information--they thought it was a traditional encyclopedia. As for students who are using it as a source in their papers and tests, I think a lot of that is just not knowing about other online resources that their libraries probably subscribe to and that they can access right in their very rooms. The rest of them are just being lazy, frankly. We are used to quickly finding information online, but a lot of people are missing the information literacy to determine if the information they are using is really what they want to be citing. Librarians to the rescue!