"The Age" newspaper in Melbourne, Australia has just brought out a supplement caled "Australians All: Essays on the Nation" (October 31, 2007) to allow a number of people to reflect on Australian society during our current election campaign.
In an article, "The end of the gatekeeper", Glyn Davis, the Vice Chancellor of Melbourne University, has this to say about Wikipedia:-
"Wikipedia offers more than 2 million published articles, covering almost every imaginable topic in mostly readable prose. Though the Wikipedia site issues warnings about its academic use, the best Wikipedia entries are written by experts checked and corrected by other experts, providing breadth of knowledge and peer review. Wikipedia itself offers hints on how to tell a good entry from a bad one. Though several American universities have banned it as a citation source, Wikipedia is so accessible it is inevitably used."
That seems more positive than anything I have read previously from Vice Chancellors and similar. Indeed it is probably more positive than any of us are.
The rest of the article is also interesting, but I do not know whether it is on the web. I can not find it.
Brian.