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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
And of course, because their articles were new and not notable, they were promptly put up for a deletion vote.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
- The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.
- The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.
- Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.
- She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.
- She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.
- She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.
- Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.
- Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.
- Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.
- Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?
So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia todayPersonally, 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.
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.)
I disagree. A significant amount of it will be good. Some of it will be bad, but probably not very much. If the prof is teaching the course this quarter, she'll probably be teaching it next year at the same time. If she doesn't cull / correct the bad articles, she can re-assign students to fix 'em. Great thing about Wikipedia -- once there's an article, it gets seen and edited by a handful, to dozens of people, depending on the subject matter. So even a crappy article can be made awesome. This is definately a good thing.
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.
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:
Nicely put, but consider: the sum total of human achievement is increased in millions of ways every single day in ways which have never been reported on, because... it's not actually newsworthy. It's more like, completely expected.
A lack of human achievement would be newsworthy. Hmmm. Perhaps that's why politics gets so much coverage...