Schools Ban Wikipedia

Wikipedia's so quick and easy—too easy, ruled a New Jersey school district, the latest of many to ban use of the popular online encyclopedia by its students and block it on school computers, fearing potentially erroneous information from the communally edited site will pollute minds and papers. “Kids just take it for gospel, they really do,” fretted the librarian leading the charge.

Few look at Wikipedia as a citable source. Anyone can edit it, sometimes leading to biased “vandalism,” like the white supremacist info school officials found on Martin Luther King’s page. The Wikimedia Foundation admits its site’s limitations, saying it should be used for background information. “It’s not a primary source,” said a spokesman. (More Wikipedia stories.)