English professor David Mikics links the rise of Wikipedia to a decline in student writing:
Wikipedia, which is against style on principle, crushes the individuality of student voice. For the kids in my class, this is what knowledge sounds like: balanced and bland, never indignant or provocative or committed—the voice of the crowd, the everyman. Student essays still occasionally contain remarks that sound jaunty, or freewheeling, or tragic, or ironic. But there are far fewer of these liberated moments than there were before Jimmy Wales gave us Wikipedia’s pasteurized version of scholarship.
But other academics are considering ways to improve the free encyclopedia. This year, the University of California, San Francisco will offer a class that gives credit to fourth-year medical students for editing Wikipedia articles. Dr. Amin Azzam, who will teach the course, explains:
When you look at [the quality of the articles], the fraction of high-quality information on Wikipedia in the medicine-related topics is significantly lower than other domains of Wikipedia. I think a large part of that is because we in the medicine community have not been embracing this model of democratized information. But when you realize that this is where all the world goes for information first, I think we’re missing an opportunity. Why don’t we contribute to improving the quality of information that the public has access to, and that the public goes to? So that’s why I became passionate about this model. I started realizing that this was a much bigger way to make a much bigger impact on public health.
The Dish 