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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."
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.
An example in German would be doing a group assignment on Schiller, then have the group add to the article after the paper had been graded. There's lots of articles that are in need of extra info, and since the schools have books on various subjects as a given, they might as well use it in their education. I do follow that it might be more labor intensive, especially to begin with while the teacher has to learn how to work this into the curriculum and grading.
Of course, another activity could be for students to take a snapshot of an article, and proceed with research (web or otherwise) to review and validate all the claims/statements. It would be a good exercise in citing sources and tuning their bullshit/propaganda detectors.
Excellent sarcasm, but that's not what I'm referring to. I don't care about the little warnings and stuff, and I don't like vandalism any more than anyone else. In fact, there was one page that someone kept vandalizing that I tried very hard to get unvandalized. It worked, and hasn't been touched for a while now.
I'm referring to the notability wars, and admins skirting around the whole peer review thing and making wholesale changes to articles, after when they ban if someone reverts them. That's a problem.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
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.
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.
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.
.. 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.