Gerry, Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one: "And at the University of Maryland<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_maryland/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org/>in a paper on the Great Depression<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as *common knowledge*." [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?_r=1&src=tptwempahs... mine] Granted, the outright copying and pasting of texts is problematic. That said, the argument that posts on Wikipedia constitute "common" knowledge is an claim worth seriously considering. What is the relationship of crowd-sourced information to "common" knowledge? What if the situations was changed a bit and the student was reproducing dates and facts, not whole text passages, out of wikipedia and supported their lack of sourcing with this claim. - Matt ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing facts from Wikipedia. ----------------------------- Matthew Bernius PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University | http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/ Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl mBernius@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius