Acknowledgments

Thanks to all of the students in my sections of BASK 1101, College Writing, and GEN 1120, Rhetoric and Composition, at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey from the fall semester 2005 through the spring semester 2008 for their contributions to my thinking about using Wikipedia as a resource for academic writing and as an assignment. Thanks also to Megan Macomber, who took time out from learning the law to read and to comment on the first draft of this piece and who noticed that I wasn’t blogging. Always insightful, Terry Hanson initiated conversations about hate speech and Wikipedia that informed my thinking in the endnote. Without Donna Reiss’ and David Blakesley’s careful readings of an earlier version of this article, I would not have been able to work through the concerns about Wikipedia raised in the media quite as effectively. The two readers from C and C Online helped me to see where my thinking and writing required final tuning. Their ideas about formatting for web readers were particularly useful, and prompted me to purchase and to begin learning the newest version of Dreamweaver, a process that was significantly streamlined with the help of Daniel Gambert, who works in Computer Services at Stockton and teaches courses in web design. He fashioned the basic template for this document and created initial CSS styles. I was able to jump in after he gave me that boost. Kristine Blair has been patient and supportive, just a joy to work with; although she may not know this, her email responses encouraged me to keep going at pivotal moments when I might not have. Finally, thanks to Will Hochman, an enthusiast for the conjunction of computers and writing and a tireless advocate for “new composition,” who passed the bug on to a predisposed me when we both worked at Southern Connecticut State University.