I know you will probably say that Wikipedia should never be used in the classroom because anyone can edit it so it is full of wrong information. “How Wikipedia works” might help you change your mind. Yes it is true that Wikipedia is edited by the population and sometimes mistakes can be included (but formal encyclopedias also contain mistakes!). This book will keep you better informed about the process involved in the writing of the articles on Wikipedia and how the community of writers works. It will help you understand that Wikipedia can be a valuable tool to teach your students to be critical thinker and to use Wikipedia as one source of information but to validate with other sources. It is a skill that they should develop even if they are using a formal encyclopedia.

This resource is actually a book published on paper. However, the authors,  Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates, have decided to make it also available for free on-line. It includes subjects such as good writing and research, becoming a Wikipedian as well as disputes, blocks, and bans. Who knows, maybe after reading this book, you will convince your students to become positive contributors to the Wikipedia.

If you are not finding as much information as you would like when you are searching on Wikipedia, you might want to have a look at wiki.com. It is a search engine based on Google that will let you search all the wikis (including Wikipedia, but also others like wiki.answers.com, wikia.com, reference.com and many others). It is much faster than checking each of these wiki sites individually.