One Controversy surrounding Wikipedia as a source for student research. The founder of Wikipedia, Jim Wales, provides the most commonsense answer to this, suggesting that although Wikipedia can help provide an overview of issues and a starting point for identifying primary sources, students are better off using primary sources as definitive sources in their research. “For God’s sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia,” Wales told one college student (Wikipedia Founder, 2006).
A more interesting question is how writing for wikis in language, composition, and other courses can affect the learning process. The potential of wikis for teaching and learning is hinted at by Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, who commented that “The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work, whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community’ (Warshauer and Grimes 2007: 12). Cunningham’s statement illuminates a central contradiction of CMC since its inception: It has served as a powerful medium for exploring identity, expressing one’s voice, airing diverse views, and developing community, yet has proven a very unsuitable medium for accomplishing many kinds of collaborative work due to the inherent difficult of arriving at decisions in groups dispersed by space and time. (See the meta-analysis comparing face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making by Baltes et al. 2002).