How I Use It
For secondary students, content specific textbooks can be challenging to students who are learning English or grapple with English due to disabilities. Simple English Wikipedia offers a stripped down resource that simplifies the syntactical structure for students. This is a perfect resources for students to reference in order to understand an academic topic. It offers a good starting off point for research so students can build up their keyword search terms and/or evaluate the resources at the end. I think it is one of those resources you make open in your class, encourage students to use, and students will be interested in using it outside of class.
I think it is a good reference text. While there are issues with using Wikipedia as a sole source of information, I think that the simplistic language and focus on the main points being made, are beneficial. It isn't as in-depth nor are there as many topics as Wikipedia, but for ELLs, most needed topics would be covered at an introductory level. Most of the more "for fun" articles are pretty skimpy and some articles aren't as well documented/vetted as their full Wikipedia counterparts.