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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."
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?
Why this is:
- Authors should WANT to write an article without being under duress
- Wikipedia (as a publishing medium) should not be used to learn or practice ones skills, but to actually help improve the knowledge of mankind (let the students use the sandboxes, sure)
- People should already have a good knowledge of what they will publish as a reference for the rest of the world. Research and referencing ones research should be secondary to the base knowledge. Using Wikipedia (for article submission) merely as an academic exercise diminishes the importance of Wikipedia
Expecting quality from an arbitrary sample of students who have time pressures to release something that SOUNDS intelligent is more akin to journalism. We all know that journalists have a tendency to make things up (fill in the gaps), or plagiarize because many just don't have the time (or attitude or aptitude) to spend a year researching or vetting their stories (on say, Cold Fusion), to produce anything of quality. (I was planning to reference an example here, but there is so much on Google that I will merely use Google as a general reference. An example search string: "times journalist lied".)
An encyclopedia, no matter how open it may be, is something of greater human interest and importance than to be used as merely an academic exercise for an arbitrary sample of students with unknown levels of experience, honesty, or intelligence.
It's yet another public embarrassment for an institution that has great ideals.
... is to provide a outlet for self-important whiners.
Let's never forget that!