This has been a very interesting discussion. Nobody has mentioned what seems to me to be the biggest problem in using Wikipedia as a source: the fact that its articles are not stable. Since, obviously, articles can and do change over time, simply citing an article would seem insufficient, as the content may change. It is interesting that the Wikipedia's design does not make it easy to do a citation that will continue to point at the version actually used. If one clicks on the history tab (for "past versions of this page"), one sees the history list and can copy those URLs. And in fact, contrary to what the flyout text for the history tab suggests, the history page also contains a URL for the current page, so in fact one could cite the specific instance of the article with something that would presumably act like a permalink. It seems to me that, for courses where Wikipedia citations are permitted, that this might be a good discipline to follow, as it foregrounds the issue of the stability or lack thereof of knowledge. --Tom -- ------------------------------------------ Tom Erickson IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Email: snowfall@acm.org (preferred); snowfall@us.ibm.com(IBM confidential) http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/