On 6/29/07, Slowking Man slowkingman@gmail.com wrote:
As far as data on professors' views of Wikipedia, I don't have anything at my fingertips, but I'm speaking more about a general principle than the current views of a majority of professionals in higher education. From personal experience, I /can/ state that in university courses, as well as some higher-tier high school courses (such as Advanced Placement in the U.S.), I've been explicitly told that encyclopedias and textbooks were not acceptable sources for research assignments.
Well, neither am I a professor, but I am a student, and I can tell you that this isn't quite so, at least in mathematics. See Google Scholar's list of citations for the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (365 cites):
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&cites=84082...
or Hungerford's Algebra (430 cites):
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&cites=10309...
Granted, some of these may well be in 'further reading' sections or such, but a fair number of them are from books and journal articles citing things.
Tracy Poff