Comment Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score 1) 317
Hi, I'm one of the professors who fails* students for using Wikipedia as a cited source.
The reason I do so is in the second paragraph of your own post. It's not a good primary source (i.e. something that can legitimately appear in a bibliography), but a great place to start from to look for primary sources.
In fact, I encourage my students to use wikipedia -- when starting their papers. But I explain to them that they can't finish their research there.
All that said, I'd love to see universities get involved in some sort of distributed funding mechanism for Wikipedia.
*that is, I fail them on the portion of the assignment where they had to do some research. Asterisks seem very popular on slashdot today.