Wikipedia and academics: who watches the watchmen?

It is an old dilemma: who watches the watchmen? Many universities
penalize the use of Wikipedia for academic research on the grounds that
Wikipedia is unreliable. On the other hand Google Scholar is considered
a good starting place for research. Why is that? The quality assurance
system of Wikipedia after all is a human based peer review concept, and
most of the better articles are based upon clearly indicated high
quality literature sources. Google Scholar on the other hand is an
algorithm based machine index. In the past it has indexed low quality
blogs as well as machine generated text. My feeling is that Universities
and commercial academic publishers sit in the same boat and protect
their interests against the open source community. There is no
fundamental reason why open source publications should be inferior to
expensive publications. It is all a matter of how the tools are used,
and that should be taught. Interestingly in Germany Wikipedia is not
banned from the academic scene - it is recommended as a valuable
starting point that has to be treated with caution - as every source.
Trust but verify...