Kasey Baker, the Western Carolina graduate student who wrote the U.S. nuclear policy article that Wikimedia officials had held up as exemplary, said he had to fight to keep strangers from hacking it apart. “That page was [almost] taken down four times, or merged with four other very separate things,” Baker said. “And the only reason it wasn’t is because I had three mentors, who had much higher administrative privileges, jumping on my side.” (Any visitor to Wikipedia can edit entries, but certain users are empowered to rule on disputes.)

Sometimes it is not enough to have good sources, writing, and organization, he said. In order to fend off other would-be editors, sometimes "you have to be kind of a dick."

Beasley-Murray, who admits, in retrospect, to having set his own expectations of quality too high, said the amount of time he spent with students on their Wikipedia entries forced him to cancel the final paper. "I was a little bit conflicted about that," he said, because "this was a class in 20th century Latin American literature.… It wasn’t a class about Wikipedia."