Wikipedia is recognized within academia as a useful research tool. At Washington University in St. Louis, the library offers courses on Wikipedia editing and creation. While substantive research must always be grounded in primary material, Wikipedia is an important aggregator of citations to little-known sources. Scholars ignore these at their own peril.

Within the Newman Numismatic Portal (NNP), Washington University student Syrus Jin has created a number of numismatic articles on Wiki that cite primary material available on NNP. Recently he wrote a summary of the Coinage Act of 1853, which, for example, references a Senate report from 1852 (loaned by Dan Hamelberg some time ago and scanned by NNP).

I’ve been following the discussion in E-Sylum about Wikipedia as an information source. Wikipedia administrator Gary Greenbaum noted that:

"We can’t use images from other sites unless they’ve been released under a Creative Commons or similar license.”

I wanted to point out that the ANS coin database MANTIS currently has about 150,000 images available for use under a Creative Commons license, and that number is growing every day.

That’s definitely going to be a big plus. I’ll start a gradual replacement of the poorer quality images and see if I can recruit some help.