A few months ago, I reported on a new assignment I worked out to help get students to think more critically about Wikipedia.

This term, I tried it again, and noticed a few things:

- Several students commented that they had never used Wikipedia before. I found that astounding. Perhaps it is not so terribly pervasive as I originally thought.

- There is a strong tendency with this assignment to write in a casual, e-mail type style. They use more or less proper grammar and punctuation, but there is little of the distanced, academic tone. They write, "I never really knew much about Wikipedia until I had to write this assignment. When I went searching for an article to do my paper on, I stumbled upon..." at hatlie.de I try to remind students what that kind of writing sounds like to a distant reader.