I teach a public speaking & rhetoric class in college, and I’m grading the first batch of speeches which are on a topic of the student’s choosing but must be focused on social science. I’ve got about 15-20% of the speeches that uncritically cite the Wikipedia – clearly treating it as just another encyclopedia without knowledge of how it is written – or at least no mention of this.

What I’m doing is explaining what it is and that it’s a good place to look for background info but that they need to cite the original resources to use the material in their speeches. I’d also encourage them to do this for any encyclopedic sources. I could think of scenarios where it might be acceptable to cite the Wikipedia as proof of norms.

So next week I’m going to discuss this with my classes along with more on source credibility generally.

Any suggestions? How have you handled this? (I’m particularly interested in responses from other Wikipedia contributors.)