[Air-L] using wikipedia articles in academic paper

[Stefano De Paoli]

Hi everybody,

recently I got the following comment from a reviewer of a paper of mine:

" *There is considerable use made of wikipedia and in an academic
paper this is disappointing. *"

I was thinking, what is the general practice in using wikipedia in
academic paper writing?
and are there limits/rules/good practices that you follow, both in
writing and in review processes?

If for example I am writing a paper on the peer review process in Open
Source development, I often use wikipedia articles as references for
technical terms, like "Diff", "CVS" or "Conditional Programming".

Not being a Computer Scientist myself and thinking that the audience
of my writings won't be composed of Computer Scientists as well, I
feel that it is good to provide some basic references for complex,
technical and often obscure terms.
In this cases I prefer to use wikipedia articles, rather than Computer
Programming or Operating Systems manuals, because I think that those
articles are better and can be easily reached by anybody.

On the contrary I never use wikipedia articles as references for
sustaining an academic argument or as references for authors (e.g. I
do not use the wikipedia article fo Harold Garfinkel, but I use the
book Studies in Ethnomethodology; I never use the wikipedia article
for referencing the "situated action" concept, but I use Lucy Suchman
book).

So, any thoughts? comments?

S.

-- 
Italian Conference on Free Software 2009
http://www.confsl.org/confsl09/

Stop the numbers game
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1300000/1297815/p19-parnas.html?key1=1297815&key2=1569876321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=25586362&CFTOKEN=14513600

My institutional page
http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml