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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.
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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.
I once asked some of my comp sci lecturers why they didn't get students to do something useful, like work on open source, instead of assigning them pointless busy work projects. Two main answers:
1. it's too hard to grade
2. it's seen by many to be exploitative.
So there ya go.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
The thing about that is that there are students who actually do try to cite Wikipedia articles as references, I've seen it plenty of times. It usually results in the instructor having to crack down on the practice. I do think though that blocking Wikipedia entirely is overkill, it should just be understood that it does not count as an official source. Wikipedia is a good place to start researching a topic, and I usually end up using one of the external references on a page as a "legitimate source."
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
I don't think they're being assigned to articles about comic book characters.
That's not surprising. A good way of consolidating any learning (or at least confirming what you've learned), is to attempt to explain/pass-it-on to another individual. If they don't/can't understand what you're communicating, (or in the case of Wikipedia - if it get's edited to shreds), then chances are, you didn't know what you were talking about...
God, i wish we'd had wikipedia when i was in school. The references section is often a wonderful, up-to-date collection of very citeable resources.
The library was a wonderful place to get peer-reviewed articles that were 20, 30 years obsolete.
Jeremy
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.
In this exercise the sum total of human achievement is increased rather than decreased. I find that highly newsworthy.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
>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
To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.
>I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to
>prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them.
Off topic. Read the article, or at least the summary. The students are from the University of Washington (a very good school btw). They are not high school students.
>I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think
>logically is now common place.
Why do you think that is?
In the US we have extremely poor k through 12 education, and then some very excellent colleges (in most other countries it is the reverse.) US high schools are paid for by *local* property taxes, so kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods get an excellent education, and most kids who grow up in middle or lower class neighborhoods get no education whatsoever until college. Many of my generation skip high school altogether and go directly into community college. The school districts provide for this in tacit acknowledgment of how worthless public high schools are.
Students are essentially expected to make up for 12 years of non education in 4 years of college. Most high schools, including the one I went to, are just jails to keep kids off the street until they turn 18.
BTW. Some, such as myself, come out of that and go on to do well in college and get a good job, only to end up paying social security to provide for the retirement of a generation which wasn't interested in providing for my generation's education. This seems fairly nonsensical to us, and so we are disinclined to continue this practice of "social security". What goes around comes around.
>Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that
>English is
>first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years),
>the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."
Languages evolve over time, and the previous generation always have the sense that the next generation is somehow speaking the language wrong. Your parents probably thought that there was something wrong in the way you talked as well. If you went to shakespeare's time, I'm sure people would think that you were some kind of idiot who couldn't speak properly.
The thing is, that english is *improving* not getting worse. Languages change in response to changing concepts, and the addition of new terminology. Modern english has extremely precise technical terminology embedded in it. Many things that were considered passive are now considered active, and so now are expressed as verbs instead of nouns. Many grammatical constructions have changed to allow for expressions that have become more common to be expressed more clearly and unambiguously. Many sophisticated systems for expressing common phrases in shorthand have developed so that ideas can be expressed more concisely.
You have to remember that no one ever *designed* the English language and that there *is no* authoritative English grammer or vocabulary because the English grammar and vocabularies are an *open set*.
The ability to construct language is genetically ingrained in all human beings, and if vocabulary or grammatical productions are ever missing or inadequate, we have the capacity to create them at will. If you leave some kids alone on an island and let them fend for themselves without teaching them any known human language, it has been demonstrated that they will generate their own complete language from the ground up in precisely 2 generations. This has been demonstrated many times. There is no real need for English language education for native speakers.
Actually, I like that idea of adding back to the article. Several of my teachers throughout school believed that the real proof that you've learned it is being able to do more than just rote memorization, such as write it or tell it in various ways, from different angles. Writing it down in wikipedia sounds excellent since you must remove bias when you type it out.
For context, click Parent.
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.
So long as the multiple references don't all hark back to one primary source. There is a myriad of regurgitated "research" floating around the 'net. You probably could find ten "primary sources" on any topic which are really reworked reports of the same research results.
Take any topic, and do some real seaching on the web, and you'll soon get a deja-vu sense while reading though the "research papers".
The assignment may very well be good for the student, but not necessarily good for Wikipedia.
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.
Suddenly I understand the spastic moderation being done on this particular thread - causing multiple comments written by myself an others to seesaw violently between -1 and 5. Apparently there are a bunch of people with moderator points who are using them to fight a proxy war between people who represent different factions of wikipedia.
That comment doesn't deserve to be modded down. However, I'd be interested in why we should care about Daniel Brandt, and specifically, why we should care enough to attribute an "anonymous coward" to the guy and then down-moderate his comments?
Of the two of you, I'd say you're coming off as the more unhinged.
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