Wharton sophomore Leonid Markel scratched his head and laughed at the Web site's mistake: Wikipedia.org had incorrectly listed President George Bush as the Republican Party's general chairman.
But it wouldn't have been so funny if that "fact" had ended up in a Political Science paper.
That's why some college professors are taking a hard stance against the site - a free, online encyclopedia that anyone can edit - and its glitches.
At the end of last month, Middlebury College's history department unanimously voted to ban the online database as an acceptable source in academic work.
Reasons for the vote included the site's lack of accuracy, resulting in students "extracting information from Wikipedia that was incorrect," Middlebury history department chairman Don Wyatt said.
Wyatt said that Wikipedia is "not acceptable for citation, and violators will be graded accordingly."
Penn has no official policy regarding using Wikipedia for schoolwork, and professors here are taking a less harsh stance than their Middlebury colleagues - some even say that, while the site isn't perfect, it can still benefit students.
"Blanket condemnation of a source as diverse as Wikipedia seems to me the opposite of critical thinking," Computer and Information Science professor Fernando Pereira wrote in an e-mail.
Critical Writing Fellow and graduate instructor Denise Tanyol likewise wrote that "Wikipedia is about making the generation and dissemination of information more democratic" in an e-mail.
But Tanyol added that she tells her students never to use Wikipedia as a source "because the articles are frequently riddled with errors."
Instead, she encourages students to read original sources and more "authoritative texts," like peer-reviewed journal articles and published books.
And academics aren't the only ones urging students to double-check their facts.
"We recommend that students check the facts the find in Wikipedia against other sources," Wikipedia spokesman Mathias Schindler wrote in an e-mail.
"It's usually not advisable, particularly at the university level, to cite an encyclopedia," he added, calling Middlebury's policy a "sensible" one.
Meanwhile, Penn students say they generally use Wikipedia less as a tool for writing a paper and more to research random topics.
"Wikipedia is good for content that is dynamic," Markel said.
"If you're looking for an article about the history of Indochina, you don't need Wikipedia. But if you're looking for current events . it's a great source because it's constantly updated," he said.
Although Middlebury students are permitted to gather information from Wikipedia for personal entertainment, using information from the site on a paper or exam will result in punishment, Wyatt said.
Wharton sophomore Alexander Herring added that he "doesn't rely on [Wikipedia] too heavily for academic papers" but "to increase my knowledge on for fun," Herring said.
-Staff writer Lauren Textor contributed reporting to this article.
