They have their uses, although why 4 people planning a camping trip would go to all the bother of a wiki in the manner described by that insufferable perk on Common Craft is beyond me. E-mail is not THAT exhausting, for goodness' sake. Now, if there were 40 people, a wiki might be useful, provided there was a Supreme Wikier to keep track of who promised what. Still a wiki has its uses for bulk information provision, and some of the links provided were interesting, although within the wikis some hadn't been updated recently, and some links were dead. That's the problem with cooperative wonders: Unless you have a resident bossy-pants who appoints him- or herself to check everybody's work to see that it meets the B-P's standards, people lose interest, leave the job, or otherwise don't keep things up.
Our shop tinkered with a wiki a while back to consolidate our ready-reference file, and I participated. The basics were technoskeptic resistant. However bells and whistles, even links, at that time required code fiddling, that had our tech person's eyes crossed. There were no how-to links on the wiki at the time, and a query to the online support group brought some awfully technical stuff that I couldn't understand, let alone implement. If the wiki sites have improved their how-tos, wikis have possibilities for all sorts of applications as some libraries have discovered.
What do I think of some instructors' refusal to accept Wikipedia as a resource? Three resounding cheers is what. Since Wikipedia has anonymous posts and is resistant to fact-checking there is no way of finding out who posted, what that person's knowledge of the subject is, and why that post was made. I remember that until there was some strong hint of legal action, Wikipedia wouldn't correct some entries made about John Kerry by Republican activists. I wouldn't bet against Democratic activists doing the same sort of thing to Republicans. Wikipedia lacks transparency in its postings, so its information has to be suspect. I'll use it for quick-and-dirty, and for things that there is no profit, either financial or emotional, for a corrupt poster. Librarians should champion transparency of authorship and quality of information, and right now Wikipedia is not there. Wikipedia needs a resident bossy-pants before it can be anything but a quick-and-dirty resource.
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