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Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles
openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."
And when the wikipedia admins come through and start wholesale editing or deleting articles, and then banning them when they try to defend their changes, they will also get a lesson in what happens when online communities start losing track of their core mission and are taken over by people with exaggerated egos and an axe to grind.
:)
Oh, wait. This is slashdot. No one here has any idea what I'm talking about. Nevermind.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I've wondered for quite a while why teachers hadn't started doing this. My old German teacher would probably be up for it...
I remember reading an article about one of the top contributors on Wikipedia - he started out by writing entries as a study aid. Makes sense to me.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
And of course, because their articles were new and not notable, they were promptly put up for a deletion vote.
Articles that actually contribute to common knowledge, and might be read more than once by someone besides the author, rather than the typical "show you know how to assemble ideas in a paper that I will then proceed to return to you so you can deposit it in the recycling bin? Thumbs up.
Obviously they weren't writing about Lockerbie Scotland (see Admin Slimvirgin aka the intelligence agent Linda Mack), or Circumcision (see admin Jayg). Or wrote something either of these admins felt was not notable, and deleted wholesale.
I'm tripping over myself to donate more money to WalesCultBomisOPedia!
Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.
My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it". I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.
I would suggest teaching students how to find legitimate sources instead of using the brute-force method of blocking everything they don't understand.
To me, Wikipedia is a wonderful resource. Although not all articles are 100% accurate, they strive to be, and have a very good system of checks and balances in place.
:)
It's also useful when you're doing your own independent research, and/or just want to search random words and follow wiki links when you're bored.
Who knows, you might actually learn something
I try to read at least 1 new wiki a day in an attempt to learn at LEAST 1 new thing a day.
I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.
/not/ the students first language. But, the problem is that it IS the students first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years), the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."
I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them. I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think logically is now common place. Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that English is
Quite frankly, I find this sort of thing going on, profoundly disturbing.
My old English professor did a technical writing course almost completely wiki-based: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/edtech/teaching_showcase/brown_bag/archive/spring06/grohens_scagnoli.html
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of slackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. If university students are WRITING Wikipedia articles as PART of their assignments, where the hell will they cut and paste from in order to finish by the deadline? And what online resource, pray tell, will the professor go to now to determine if a student has been cutting and pasting? Its like a frickin' hall of mirrors!
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
As a part of the CS department's Computer Vision class at Princeton we have to contribute wikipedia articles on subjects related to the field, and it makes up 10% of our semester grade.
Sheez, hasn't this been going on for a while? When I was teaching in Japan almost two years ago, one of the other teachers in my district said he was having the students write up their towns in Wikipedia for a group project. You can still see some of their edits if you go to Oyabe, Toyama and other pages. This isn't really news.
how do i c&p *into* wikipedia? what am i supposed to use as a source?
My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it".
As opposed to the rest of the internet which is chock-full of nothing but the highest quality, peer-reviewed content, written universally by the finest experts, hand selected from across the world?
I can only guess you're not reading this from a school computer, since anyone can post comments... and frankly anyone frequently does so.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have given an assignment to work on a Wikipedia article, and I would be amazed if there weren't many more. Students thoroughly enjoyed the assignments.
What this instructor did was great. I'm not sure it is newsworthy.
That's the last thing we need - students, therefore definitely not experts on the topics of environmental history, writing articles because they are forced to by their professor, instead of having any real interest in the subject. This assignment probably makes it less likely that they will ever contribute in the future: know how many "papers" I wrote of my free will since I graduated? ZERO.
Get off your pompous a** and look it up yourself.
It will be interesting to monitor these articles if the students don't maintain them once the course has finished. Do they maintain their improved quality over time, or do they eventually get eroded by an army of badly informed editors? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to measure the "half life" of knowledge within Wikipedia? In the absence of a concerted maintenance effort by a dedicated individual does the quality of a typical article increase of does it decay to noise? Sadly my experience with some articles which I was once passionate about, but am less so now, suggests the latter.
Recently I had also getting tired of my computing projects that taught me nothing other than blindly following assignment requirements. The marking scheme makes students only try to make a program works and throw the program away after project submission. It would be great if universities can assign students to improve some open source projects too. Anyway the only difference I found in computing assignments from essay assignments is that almost no one had even attempt to copy code from any open source project just because either they are too lazy to read code or the assignment is too easy.
However I can foresee that if this kind of assignment becomes popular the assignment might become too hard for students. Because Wikipedia is open, a student not only needs to compete with other students in the same university, but also students from other universities and any other people around the world. The quality of Wikipedia will also be improved until so good that its very hard to make any major edit without significant knowledge. Wikipedia may haven't reach this stage, but it will.
Hence I can think of 2 ways to make it an easier assignment: one is to edit some other wiki such as LinuxMM. Or the university may start its own Wiki/Open Source project to reduct competition from the outside world. Of course the latter idea is not that good compared with the original idea, but when we reach some stage this might be the alternative way that is at least better than current system.
"University of New South Wales Associate Professor Andrew Collins has just completed a 10-week project with his advanced immunology class, requiring students to correct errors and fill the gaps in Wikipedia articles related to immunology."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-project-is-a-class-act/2007/10/31/1193618940842.html
Complete with kooky picture of said Professor.
This reminds me of a a teacher friend of mine who wanted to have his upper classes edit subtle inaccuracies into Wikipedia articles, then assign his lower class to write reports on those subjects the upper classes tainted. That way he'd know who used Wikipedia as a primary source and didn't do their due diligence.
the only way you can truly make sure your contributions are held as they were meant to be is to present them and hold them yourself. the edit fucks at wiki are going to have their way with these kids' submissions. hopefully the kids will take the lesson to heart.
The entire "Global Warming" crap is a lie anyhow.
Wikipedia seems the perfect place for it.
Train your enviro' students to lie to a wide audience.
1) Search Wikipedia for teaching materials.
2) Nothing here.
3) Ask students to fill the teaching materials.
4) No need to teach any more, as the students now understand the topic.
5) ?
6) Profit.
Maybe the school figures it will block the encyclopedia written by students so that its students can focus on the encyclopedias written by professors and other professional researchers? That makes sense to me.
The students aren't using text books written by the guy sitting at the desk next to them, why should their research sources be dorm-grown?
The professor of my literary criticism class let us write a wikipedia page (or substantially add to an existing one) on a topic that interested us related to the course in lieu of taking a final. That "in lieu of" catch made him make us all swear not to tell anyone in the administration about the deed, so I guess it was more of a silent thing.
I did mine on one of the essays in the Norton anthology on the reading list, Realism in the Balance. I find it really cool that other people have edited the page, like I made a substantive contribution to human knowledge that was way better than scribbling about postmodernism for three hours in a blue book.
Also, English classes are really, really easy.
Although you might not be aware, this is nothing new - it's merely only come into the public spotlight now. This has been happening since 2003-2004.
I think it's a great idea - no more is work merely a "school game" to get magical number hopefully approaching 100, but something that can, ultimately, potentially benefit another. People can see what you've done, and will appreciate it if it's worthwhile. It's a much more positive environment.
the meme doesn't contain the "i'm so sorry" part...
F A I L ! 1
When I was an undergraduate student, I find it really hard to get certain definitions to words even theories. Simply because, most books try to explain things in chapters rather trying to give a good definition in a brief paragraph, then explaining. This is a major problem when it comes to citing in a research paper. This is why need something like Wikipedia. Also it would be a great exercise for students. Over the years, due to demanding competition (at least in asia), students became more and more selfish. So I expect this movement help in sharing the knowledge in one way or another. Furthremore, this would be a good exercise for future researchers. Regardless how good you do research, at the end of the day, you got to publish it.
Textbooks are citable; encyclopedias, whether wiki or dead-tree, are not. Any encyclopedia should be treated as a starting point for further research, not as an end. So if the guy at the desk next to you wrote the Wikipedia article you're reading, using it in your research is kind of like going up to the guy and asking him if he can help you figure out the subject and if he's found any good references. You wouldn't cite that kind of conversation either.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One of my classes requires. We are also required to keep a blog (check mine out theclarkzone.justfree.com). Our teacher's belief is that we will write better if we assume the whole world will read it. I think it has helped.
I was assigned to do this way back in 2004. This is not news.
One of the problems with Wikipedia right now is that there is usually only one source per fact. That's usually how papers are done as well, but since Wikipedia is electronic there should be a way to allow for multiple citations per fact.
What might be more useful is for a new tab to be created for references, just like how the 'talk' page is its own tab. Then all the references can be put there, with multiple users confirming the citation exists:
1 statement -> multiple citations/references -> with multiple users attesting to a citation.
The Wikiproject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check was created over 3 years ago to deal with this very issue.
Personally, I too found writing for Wikipedia a very educational experience. The most important thing I learned was how to properly research and reference everything I wrote; I would make sure that I was never making any assumptions in what I wrote and that everything was as completely accurate, or at least true to my source material. If you start with a number of good books and scientific articles for reference material, you can produce really good articles. Never having studied in university, it's probably the closest I've ever come to doing scientific research. I found it to be a very satisfying experience and the lessons I learned will last me a lifetime.
The downside is when other people, who don't put nearly the same amount of effort into their research, come along and start adding information to the same article; almost always without any references. As opposed to simple vandalism that can easily be spotted by anyone, bad information degrades the overall quality of the article and is often difficult for other contributers to spot unless they are well versed in the subject matter. To maintain the quality of the articles you put so much work into, the only solution is to check on them constantly, often getting into protracted debates with determined individuals who really know very little. I find this quite depressing, but I see no immediate solutions. Citizendium, Veropedia? Maybe, but for now they're pretty obscure and it will be a long time before either have anywhere near the range of articles that Wikipedia does.
When I took Japanese History two years ago, we were given the assignment to pick a random topic related to Japanese history, research it, and write a Wikipedia article on the subject.
This worked well for Japanese History because the English language Wikipedia didn't have too many articles at the time, and even the articles it did have were fragmentary and for the most part abandoned. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to do with more "mainstream" articles. You'd get more feedback from other Wikipedia users, sure, but you'd also be providing far less of the content.
Here's the original Associated Press article without the annoying Physorg ads. (Google finally cut out the middlemen and started hosting Associated Press content themselves.)
A teacher of mine has decided to do the same thing. Andrew Landahl will have us do the same for a course in Quantum Information instead of a final exam. Pick a topic we've seen during the lecture and write an article on it for Wikipedia, assuming it doesn't already exist.
It's certainly a different approach. Considering the article will cover some obscure aspect of quantum info, to be seen mostly by people that know far more about it than we do, I can't say I'm not a bit uneasy about this project.
My motorbike travels in Chile.
Des Moines University www.dmu.edu students are now being trained in Wiki writing also. It looks like Wikis are here to stay and universities everywhere are beginning to train in Wiki writing. The fact that Des Moines University is a medical university is even more interesting. Wikis have become an important tool in the online world and will continue to be an important tool in the future of everything from medicine to engineering.
I suspect that at least more than a couple of academics that are doing this. One instance that I know of is postings of an Intro to Neuroscience class taught by Steve Potter (a researcher in neuron controlled robots) at Georgia Tech's Biomedical Department. Each student in the class was instructed to pick one uncovered neuroscience topic and write an article on it. I don't know how far his assignments stretches back, but it has been done at least since last year.
... is to provide a outlet for self-important whiners.
Let's never forget that!
The assignment may very well be good for the student, but not necessarily good for Wikipedia.
At the risk of pointing you to the work of a five year old, perhaps you should check out this Wikipedia article on the slippery slope and why it can be a fallacy. Its use in conjunction with a straw man argument seems particularly relevant to your post.
I'll come out of the closet here. I have assigned this to my students in advanced courses as well. But I always make it optional. Students have a choice: write up lecture notes for one lecture to share with their fellow students in class or find an article related to the course material in Wikipedia and improve it substantially.
My experience has been that those that do this have made very nice contributions for the community. I check up on it to make sure that it is not confused. Of course, I have only tried this in the relatively small classes that we have here at Berkeley.
The academic world is about the developing and sharing of knowledge with our fellow human beings. Wikipedia seems like one of the right ways to do this for well established results with immediate benefits and very little pain.
but it's like the discovery channel... channel surfing, something catches your eye. You watch, and you realize it's now 5 hours later and you're still watching discovery. That's Wikipedia... the Discovery Channel of the Internet!
Professor had everyone create an account ending in "mas214" (the course number). Everyone procrastinated and then did such a bad job the accounts got blocked for vandalism and an investigation was launched into whether they were sock puppets. Here's one user's talk page. It ended up on the administrator noticeboard. So professors, if you're going to assign Wikipedia, take the time to understand what Wikipedia is about first.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
You all probably helped me out a lot in the japanese history class i took last year.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
This is not the first assignment of its type. There have been more than 40 such projects; there are at least 10 more in progress. The students and the professors need to be aware of the "No original research" policy. Many university-level assignments involve original research, and Wikipedia is not the right place for publishing original research.
Here are some of the articles created as a part of the assignments we're talking about:
Yes, academia is about sharing with out fellow human beings, we do this through the process of peer review. However, wikipedia is not peer review. The relevant definition of 'peer' is: "a person who is equal to another in abilities, qualifications, age, background, and social status." [www.dictionary.com]
Whereas wikipedia is: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"
QED. I don't think you have to send this post off to two referees to figure that out.
...and the main compliant was that they were writing essays not articles (writing style was arguing a point of view, rather than stating the facts) and that they did not cite sources (or did not cite properly) i.e. they acted as new editors have always acted in Wikipedia. It was only noticed because they did it on mass from similarly named accounts and so were suspected as being one person... The Professor was contacted and apologised, and said he would prepare the students better next time by including giving them some of the Wikipedia editing guides, but said "My experience though is that no matter how often you explain matters of style and substance, students will do what students do"
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I often post anonymously since moderators tend to overlook or moderate down my posts. Make no mistake, I sometimes get +5 whatever, and karma is excellent (kinda hard not to if you post alot with just -1 as negative bonus). Moderation seems erratic and random though.
/. have blinders on and think they are representing science, while every Great Thinker in the history of science have studied most the religions, traditions and other world-views, besides travelling alot too.
/. crowd, compared to who they *think* they are, seems pretty narrow minded, and fighting for having my voice in such a crowd is beyond the scope of my time, so sometimes I just raise my voice, and whoever wants to hear can listen to that. But endlessly discussing the same tired things over and over is uninteresting.
However, I often just want to express my opinion and not deal with the aftermath. When so many on
Frankly, the
It is likely that some schools block Wikipedia after complaints of vandalism. School IPs are a large source of vandals, and Wikipedia will message these schools about it in some cases. School's computer admins gets a message about their students abusing some site, and knee jerks by blocking it.
so now we know who is in charge of Gundam !!!
In Soviet Russia, Gundam is in charge of CowboyNeal..or something..
This is an excellent idea. I am a lecturer in a UK university, and I will attempt to do the same next term.
Their peers are students - but their articles are being reviewed by a professor. So no, it's not peer review.
You act like this one, perhaps slightly low quality article, is going to break Wikipedia. This is how articles start. Sometimes people who don't know much about the subject write the structure to better entice an expert to stay and fix it up. Eventually other people will read it, and get this, they can edit the page too. It doesn't have to be perfect at the start, it's an iterative process. Collaborative too, people who take that student's work and expand upon it.
Maybe you should check out this Wikipedia thing. It's not quite as fragile as you think, it's already got a few articles.
Yeah, you're right. The last thing Wikipedia needs is a bunch of college educated students making edits under the supervision of professors. It is assuredly the death knell for any wiki.
This is exactly the way Wikipedia needs to go. Teachers need to stop treating Wikipedia like a piece of dirt, find out what it's about and how it works so they can understand it better, and advocate this to the students. Teachers should lead the way in showing the general public that Wikipedia is not trash.
Getting to work inside the current wiki think is not that simple. You first have to create/edit some articles to get to know that there are some wikipedians that have too much free time on their had to do some deletions .
to be "notable" means that it is interesting to current wiki editors who have time to fight out edit fights.
My wife teaches upper level High School Spanish in South Carolina and I came up with this same idea for her about 2 years ago. I was looking at the number of Spanish articles on Wikipedia (about 300,000) vs. the number of English articles on Wikipedia (about 2,000,000) and I figured that having her upper level students create or improve articles on es.wikipedia.org would have several benefits: 1) her students would get exposed to Wikipedia, 2) es.wikipedia.org would get some improvement, 3) her students would get to improve their spanish, 4) they would learn more about some topic, and 5) they would be contributing to society in general rather than doing work that only helps them learn. I feel like it is a win for everyone.
So I ask this question, would this type of thing be frowned upon by Wikipedia if there was sufficient supervision of the students to make sure what they were putting up was correct (factually and grammatically)? That was the biggest thing that prevented me from having her do this. I didn't want to run into admins or other contributors that had no patience with the process that would be involved. Would it be smart to explain what we were doing in the Talk page of each article?
What do you think Slashdot?
I for one appreciate it, and think it is a phenomenal idea. I wish I had had an assignment like this when I was in college.
--josh
.. now that would be a lot research! Why do we just waste all that effort? Why not publish all papers on the web, even at the high school level?
We produce a work just to pass a course or test, and then we never use that report, or term paper again. Odd how we can recycle tin cans but waste the labors of mind.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Most of us have enough sense, however, to have our students write the articles on a closed media wiki, and then after peer review and evaluation in the course, students are 'allowed' to up load them. Filling wikipedia with student's practice work does not make sense, but letting them think in that direction and practice elsewhere works. There are a lot of areas in wikipedia that get ignored, because the typicalwikipedite (or slashdotty perhaps :) does't consider it worthy, and this is a way to fix that.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
as a high school teacher who is constantly thinking of ways to improve the educational system, this is huge. how many thousands of hours and millions of dollars of different resources are used up just so students can write a papers to/for teachers?
sure, the idea is that by writing something for the 'expert' teacher (naturally, not always the case), the student will learn how to write. but besides the cyclical waste -- paper written > printed (usually) > graded > looked at > thrown out (or put away somewhere forever) -- it is so damn inefficient. basically, one of the problems with the current predominant education system is that so much of it is pedagogical and only pedagogical and has no 'real world' meaning.
at the least, this is a step in the right direction.
now i gotta run to class..
That's what I was thinking.
Lets take a potentially subjective subject, assign a bunch of 20 year old kids who care enough about it to want a grade and little more, and get them to parrot back whatever garbage they've seen on the after school movie of the week.
Then, lets criticize the editors for trying to put some sense of reality back into the drivel.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
As you pointed out, there are many more English articles than Spanish. Simply translating some good quality English article into Spanish articles would be useful to the site. Upper level Spanish students should be able to do a better job than automatic translators. Comparing their results to what Babelfish or some other translator site puts out would show them how much is "lost in translation" without human intervention.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
From my perspective, there appears to be a mod-war between moderators up-modding my comment and down-modding my comment. About once every hour or two (I haven't been keeping track of time), the moderation on this comment has been changing from positive to Overrated to positive to Overrated.
;) Trust me on this one, we criticize a lot, but the same people often have American friends and go to Disney world.
I'm suspecting that people who are moderating me Overrated are either:
- Students
- Teachers
- WikiPedians
- Journalists
- or "fanboys" of either or all of the above
I'm only stating this because only my first moderation (that I noticed) was at a +3; all other moderations (since I lost my Karma-bonus) never got above +2 (not that I can remember seeing anyways). People may be taking my comments as being derogatory to themselves or their professions or interests. It seems obvious that at least some people don't even want the comment to be at +2, and perhaps lower than +1. So be it.
If anyone takes offense at my comments, then please understand that my arguments deal with processes, and not with individual professions or interests. One can like something and be critical of it. Much like Canadians like Americans
Many people think the Spanish Wikipedia has few articles because of edit wars. I think your students would not be welcome, as most people are not welcome there. There are many language wars: Spanish only vs. bilinguals (Catalan, Basque, Galician). Spaniards vs. Latin Americans. Chileans vs. Peruvians. A new language war would not be a nice thing to see.
So obviously written by the "privacy advocate" Daniel Brandt, or one of his cronies (but really, he has no life, so he probably wrote it). Name me another "privacy advocate" who meticulously compiles a list of personal information (names, photos, DOB, contact, sexual orientation, friends, family) of Wikipedia editors, and then posts it online.
An investigation was launched into whether they were sock puppets!? WTF is happening over there are Wikipedia. Before you reply, you better make sure I'm not a paper plate bean shaker-- you wouldn't want to leak valuable intel to our kindergarten craft project overlords.
Comment of the year
Wikipedia is not in charge of Gundam.
Educated - past tense of educate. Usually applied to people have made it through the meat grinder, not those who are currently in it. I would also point you to the work of the inimitable Wizard of Oz, who wisely observed that you can not give someone a brain, but you can give them a diploma.
/. moderation system.
Believe me, I know all about the quality of work one might expect from an average college student. Maybe you're not aware of this, but most college/university educations work on the principle of meritocracy. Maybe you have heard of "grading on the curve"? You see, some folks just don't perform as well as others. So this notion that mere participation in a class will somehow elevate the individual discourse of all participants to the point that everyone's work should be worthy of global publication is absurd on the face of it. Almost as absurd, in fact, as the
I would also be concerned that someone other a SME ( Subject Matter Expert ) is writing article wholesale for wikipedia. I would think that these /students/ are supposed to be /learning/ about the topic, not teaching others on a topic they're just being introduced to.
When I read the wikipedia article on Star Trek, I'm certain it's been written and vetted by dozens on fanatic Trekkers. When I read a wikipedia article on a little known ecological disaster from fifty years ago, I'd rather it was written by a professor, reporter, or enthusiast on the topic ( like a survivor ), rather than someone who is just relaying what they got from two hours of research and comments by their prof.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
Now there's an interesting page that bears thinking about. Of the most wanted articles 218 are random tennis players (mostly linked to by the same group of pages), and 55 are on Texas legislative sessions (again linked to by the same group of pages (but not the same group of pages that link to the tennis players)).
Environmental history?
Enough said.
In Soviet Russia, Sorry I am
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
See Eduzendium.org. In short, the Citizendium is the perfect venue for professors who want their students to do public writing. Why? Because most topics are wide open, and the project is managed in a way that will appeal to most professors. Already, we have had a half-dozen or more articles contributed by students of Citizendium editors, as part of course assignments. We hope to do serious recruitment for the program later this year and next year.
A teacher decides to take an intelligent, constructive attitude towards the Wikipedia. And the loudest Slashdotters deplore her for the Demise of Western Civilization.
Surely, you don't go to the Wikipedia for well-verified fact. Surely you don't read Wikipedia articles expecting them to be 100% true, but rather understand it as a shortcut for googling till you find the homepage of the one person who's so freakin' passionate about whatever obscure thing you want to know about that they learned how to write html to put a webpage up.
Surely, you use the Wikipedia as a way to get a quick overview of a company/product/project in a less biased way than you'd find on the project's own web page.
Surely you don't go to the Wikipedia expecting to learn something about topics like God and evolution, or even politicians.
Surely you know that pages on the Wikipedia aren't static and will be edited sooner or later.
I don't understand the problem: college professor asks college students to write Wikipedia articles. Where there was before no information available, some is now available. It might be sketchy. It might even be wrong. But it's providing a starting point for someone learning about the subject. How is this a bad thing? Why are college students, the people who, at times, do a lot of the heavy lifting on doctoral dissertations, people we can't trust with the Wikipedia?
I'd expect this sort of reaction in 'Academics Against the Internet' coffeeshop meeting. My mind is blown that people who post on Slashdot would react in any way that didn't include either sentiment: "'bout time' or 'this isn't news'."
go bears
.
Yeah sure, but at least they are being held to some sort of standard. What's the current qualification to be a Wiki editor? I think you need an IP address, hardly any reassuredness about quality there. This is obviously a good idea, and your hangups about incompetent students are misplaced. Hell, at least they're not going to be vandals.
I'd guess everything has been said about this subject so i'll just rant. I think there is something really wrong with a wikipedia that insist on needing citations is highly aware and preventive of copywright violations and plagiarism AND has a ban on original research.
What I find really wrong of "citation vandalism" as it has been called, is that it goes against the "massive parallel knowledge" that wikipedia used to be. It used to be that if you said rubbish things they got deleted but if you said right things it stayed up there. Now been right is not enough, you have to use somebody's website, even a random website for your addition to be preserved. It puts more faith in little personal pages that collective knowledge.
But... the future refused to change.
Here's what I did last academic year, in two junior/senior-level seminars:
- All students were required to contribute to a wiki I run -- collaboratively producing lecture and discussion notes.
- Students were also offered extra credit to edit film articles on Wikipedia.
The results of this wiki experiment were mixed. Less than half of the students did the required assignment -- even though their grades were lowered for lack of participation and constructing lecture/discussion notes would have been a huge advantage to them on the exams.And, as far as the extra-credit option goes, out of about 40 students, only 3 chose to do it. The ones that did sent me their Wikipedia ID and a link to the articles they edited. By checking the articles' history pages I could easily see how much work they did and how good it was.
I wish I had a better sense of why my wiki experiment failed. Is wiki editing (which works like word processing did in, oh, 1985) too hard and unfamiliar? Are students unwilling to share their lecture/discussion notes with others? Should the assignments have been structured differently? Were these particular students luddites who did not understand the technology of wikis? Did I not give them enough instruction on how wikis work?
I really don't know the answer, but my experience last year was negative enough that this year I eliminated the required wiki work, although I am still offering extra credit for editing Wikipedia articles. We'll see how it goes.
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com
There's nothing "obviously" good about this at all.
My position still stands. Wikipedia, like many other electronic forums before it (e.g. Slashdot), is beginning to sag under it's own weight. The hordes of average and below average contributors will continue to increase, and Wikipedia's quality will suffer, unless they develop better strategies to combat the banality.
In a course called "Information Systems" for MBA students, we have started doing the same with youtube for final assignments and slideshare for the students and profesor's powerpoint presentations. Use keywords "UCV" and "CEAP" to see the publications (in spanish).