Hi everybody, recently I got the following comment from a reviewer of a paper of mine: " *There is considerable use made of wikipedia and in an academic paper this is disappointing. *" I was thinking, what is the general practice in using wikipedia in academic paper writing? and are there limits/rules/good practices that you follow, both in writing and in review processes? If for example I am writing a paper on the peer review process in Open Source development, I often use wikipedia articles as references for technical terms, like "Diff", "CVS" or "Conditional Programming". Not being a Computer Scientist myself and thinking that the audience of my writings won't be composed of Computer Scientists as well, I feel that it is good to provide some basic references for complex, technical and often obscure terms. In this cases I prefer to use wikipedia articles, rather than Computer Programming or Operating Systems manuals, because I think that those articles are better and can be easily reached by anybody. On the contrary I never use wikipedia articles as references for sustaining an academic argument or as references for authors (e.g. I do not use the wikipedia article fo Harold Garfinkel, but I use the book Studies in Ethnomethodology; I never use the wikipedia article for referencing the "situated action" concept, but I use Lucy Suchman book). So, any thoughts? comments? S. -- Italian Conference on Free Software 2009 http://www.confsl.org/confsl09/ Stop the numbers game http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1300000/1297815/p19-parnas.html?key1=1297815... My institutional page http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml