This is getting hammered at the moment due to being linked on Slashdot and other places, but PARC researchers have built WikiDashboard, a really neat "add-on" to Wikipedia that presents Wikipedia articles with inline graphs and statistics on their edit history. This blog entry explains some of the conceptual framework behind the tool, and this one provides guidance in interpreting the information and using the tool. Very cool! I fall pretty firmly on the pro-Wikipedia side in the librarianship debates (partly because I know people are going to use it anyway no matter how much some of us tut-tut, so we need to think about how to use it as an information source), and I think tools like this and WikiScanner are helpful to us in conceptualizing Wikipedia and presenting it to users.
Something I always emphasize when talking about Wikipedia is that while the articles are presented in an objective encyclopedic tone, each article is a "work in progress" with an often extensive history of editing and revision. Wikipedia is unusually transparent compared to many information sources in allowing end-user access to the sausage-making part of information presentation (if that mixed metaphor makes any sense).
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