Speaking as an instructor at a fairly large and fairly mainstream university who's seen the widespread and apparently spontaneous adoption of Wikipedia as a taken-for-granted (as in "Why are you marking me down for this?") citational source among undergraduates, I'd venture to guess that part of the problem is this: we who profess to theorize new media have yet to grapple significantly with the implications of news items such as this this: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/05/2010247.shtml?tid=95&tid=99 in which the nature of new media proves itself once again to exceed the glacial engines of academic thought. Wikipedia as an information source responds *instantly* to updates; all well and good. But the news media responds equally quickly, giving us stories in the Sunday times, on Google News (itself a logical outgrowth of Wiki's information aesthetic -- no less an distinctive and individual brand for its nonprofit status) and in the very-definition-of-cutting-edge Slashot.com. Wikipedia itself responds to the response by mutating its operating procedure. In short: old media (which, for better or worse, we must admit to understanding as the media of our youths, the media in which we were schooled) ticked along at a reassuringly slow pace -- suited to the rythyms of graduate students and university faculty toiling away at their research projects in libraries, journals, print, textbooks, classroom curricula. Wikipedia, both as an information source and a legal/cultural entity, updates *fast* -- faster, I suspect, than even the dedicated legions of bloggers can cope with. Even as we debate the relative merits and disadvantages of Wikipedia, we academics & theorists fall into the subtly ridiculous category of the quaint -- the ones who are doomed to remember (and repeat ad nauseum, like old Abe Simpson) "the way it used to be." Meanwhile, I wonder in the face of the coming semester: what's the best way to sensitize my 20 and 21-year-old students to the alarm that I feel in the face of Wikipedia? How do I get them involved? And how do I assign credit for it? Bob --------------------------------------- Bob Rehak Department of Communication and Culture Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-9700 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal www.sagepub.co.uk/animation