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Journalism Students Assigned To Write On Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "eCampus News reports that at the University of Denver, journalism students are assigned to write Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation, and students have so far composed 24 Wikipedia articles this year, covering topics from the gold standard to the San Juan Mountains to bimetallism, an antiquated monetary standard. Journalism instructors Lynn Schofield Clark and Christof Demont-Heinrich say students are told to check their sourcing carefully, just as they would for an assignment at a local newspaper. 'Students are leery about mentioning Wikipedia, because they might be subjected to criticism. But I tell them it's an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss all of [its content],' says Demont-Heinrich, who first assigned the Wikipedia writing to students in his introductory course taught during the university's recent winter semester. He said the Wikipedia entries didn't require old-school shoe leather reporting — because the online encyclopedia bars the use of original quotes — but they teach students how to thoroughly research a topic before publishing to a site that has over 350 million unique visitors and gets over 10 billion page views a month. 'I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,' says Demont-Heinrich. 'If you're not trained to expect that and write for that, then you're not going to be ready for the work world.'"
A course on manipulating Slashdot?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Given Wikipedia's propensity to delete articles as non-notable, I consider this a very, very bad idea.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
People are very negative about wikipedia, but generally it is accurate. It is also valuable simply to see where the writers of the articles got their information from, so it's a good starting point for researching a topic.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
When they find their hard work replaced the next day by a 12 year old who just made something up and posted it so his buddies would laugh it!
My user ID is a palindrome!
"But I tell them it's an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss all of [its content],'"
That's very true. In fact, Wikipedia has made it very easy for me simply dismiss only those facts I happen to disagree with. In that regard it's a great tool for anyone who wishes to be out of touch with reality.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I'm sure the +5 funny/insightful "But how many will be deleted for lack of notability?" is on its way. As hilarious as such remarks are, I think they misrepresent Wikipedia. I've created many articles over the years. Not one has been deleted. A few of the tragically short ones were merged into a larger article that covered the subject as a whole. You want to know my secret? Citing sources. You know, what Wikipedia policy says to do. And for good reason.
Both news writing and Wikipedia (encyclopedia) writing requires one to be impartial, to establish notability of the subject and to be precise. The best part about it is that those students will quickly learn in the wiki process that their writing can be much improved and that there is more aspects to their subject then they thought.
A couple years ago my quantum theory course had 10% of our grade from "Contributing to Wikipedia's coverage of quantum physics and related math topics." http://am473.ca/
Nobody writes neutral, well-referenced articles like journalists! And they're great at engaging viewpoints that undermine their article's thesis!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I recommend they have majors in Journalism and minors in Political Science.
How refreshing it is to see someone in academia who truly cares about preparing their students for the real world...
If more of our teachers and professors actually had real world experience, we might not have a workforce that is falling behind.
Rather than have students waste time producing busywork that the professor will Trashfile at the end of the year, they are contributing their efforts toward society. These Wiki articles will be picked-up by other editors and added to with new information, and someone like me will come along and read them years later.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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They should be forced to post a comment on /. if they want to learn how to take criticism.
Just what I wanted. An undergraduate student writing an Encyclopedia article on monetary standards...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I've seen quite a few of these projects- ongoing ones are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects, while past ones are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects. They seem to cover a lot of different areas- technical, cultural, historical, whatever. Those lists don't seem to include the high school projects; I've seen a few biology classes with projects to write articles about animals and such.
An "Encyclopedia" article on monetary standards written by a fifteen year-old on a bet made in the back of school bus that he couldn't work mentions of both John Maynard Keynes and Jenna Jameson into the same article.
I like this sort of problem but it does bother me a bit when a teacher can assign his students "Give away your intellectual property" as an exercise. Writing articles, yes, using Wikipedia yes. Good skills. But even if stuff is done for a class (which you're typically paying to attend, directly or indirectly) I don't see why the school should own stuff you produce or be able to determine what you do with it, beyond requiring you to give them reasonable access so they can mark it. It's a bit different for research students since at least they might be getting some funding / support (although often less than you'd think).
Ditto where teachers have taken their classes out to do stuff of OpenStreetMap. I think in both cases it's good experience and it's nice that students are encouraged to do something for The Greater Good but I think it's fairest if there's a line between what you have to do *for your class* and giving access to that information to the wider world. Seems to me that the academic / learning side does not require Free licensing to be satisfied, so whether to contribute to a public project should be an individual choice.
Re: your comment, GP's user ID *IS* a palindrome. It helps if you know what a word means before you correct someone else's use of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/palindrome
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palindrome
http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/
Oops, well 3 out of 4 anyway ;)
Wouldn't it make more sense to have journalism majors write for Wikinews instead? They could even get accredited for press passes.
Gomer79's userid is "43434". Usually I wouldn't cite wiki or feed AC trolls, but it seems apt here.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome
BTW It helps if you know what "userid" means before you use it.
TODO create witty sig.
I remember seeing this user that hangs around on the "Articles for Deletion" page who helps fix articles. He goes around and finds trouble articles with various problems (grammar, citations, etc) and cleans them up to save them from deletion. Granted, the professor is trying something unique and I applaud him for doing that, however he should teach the students how to properly use Wikipedia. Teach the students how to follow the citations and to understand how to spot abuse. Take a look in the "Talk" pages and see where other users are spotting problems. From there teach the students the inner workings of how the entire system works, from creation, to editing, to deletion, whatever.
That journalism professor is onto something here. Wikipedia is here to stay and it is a great resource for getting information that is, relatively speaking, accurate. More people should know how Wikipedia's system works.
I can see how this might be interesting in that it's related to a "writing class", but it's an on-line writing class! It is good to see that they are stressing some of the basics that may be somewhat lacking in some on-line (esp. non-journalistic) writing.
We had assignments to write articles for Wikipedia for several years as part of an electronic music class - each student submitted several articles (totals in the hundreds over the years the class ran) on music or music technology to Wikipedia. See http://wayneandwax.blogspot.com/2006/06/electro-class-of-06.html for more details.
}#q NO CARRIER
They "get it." Wikipedia is unique, but it is based on elements of traditional scholarship--citing sources--and journalism--the "neutral point of view."
As for the snarky comments on notability, they are misplaced. The bar for notability is very low and easy to surmount, and the community culture tends to support inclusion if there is even a shred of supporting evidence to justify it. It is mostly a problem for those who object _in principle_ to bothering to provide evidence, to self-promoters who believe they should be free to use Wikipedia to publicize themselves and thus _attain_ notability, to people who regard themselves as experts and believe that they are entitled to contribute material without supporting evidence on their own authority. There is also principled opposition by people who have a different vision of what Wikipedia should be than the prevailing view.
I have rescued a number of articles from deletion simply by citing sources. One example: an article, when originally created, read in its entirety as follows: "[name], AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net." As such, it was ripe for deletion. What did I do? I found the source, the Library Journal article that called her a "mover and shaker" and demonstrated that Library Journal found her notable. I found that she'd been mentioned in The New York Times, as one of the "credentialed bloggers" given press credentials to attend a political convention, the first time that had been done. I found a Wired article about her opposition to the Patriot Act's library provisions. By adding these to the article, I showed that she had _some_ notability and allowed editors to gauge _what that degree of notability was_. That turned out to be sufficient to prevent deletion.
The librarian was no more and no less notable than she was when the original article was inserted and nominated for deletion. All that changed was that I was willing to put in a little work, and show what amount of notability she had--more than me, less than Meryl Streep; what she was notable for (not just starting a blog); and who, exactly, had taken note of her.
It is not hard to get a new article into Wikipedia. In an incident that demonstrated Wikipedia at its worst, some Dartmouth students who didn't follow their class assignments well contributed breezy articles in promotional language about their fraternities and their a cappella groups. They encountered a storm of criticism that unfortunately turned snarky, unkind, and dismissive as irritable editors saw Dartmouth article after Dartmouth article. Meanwhile, it almost passed unnoticed that other students had contributed valuable articles, such as one about an unfinished Jane Austen novel. This was, of course, accepted, and nobody ever suggested that there was a notability problem, even though I never heard of it and I imagine you never did, either.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Journalists at the University of Denver have their homework PENIS PENIS PENIS
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So, like so many new-school journalists, they look up a topic on the internet and rehash their findings on the internet.
They rearrange facts, as opposed to classic journalists whose goal was to uncover or discover them.
It's interesting, but nothing new. For the Design Patters course of my CS degree, I expanded the Wikipedia article for Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software book. That was back in July 2007.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
That's very true. In fact, Wikipedia has made it very easy for me simply dismiss only those facts I happen to disagree with. In that regard it's a great tool for anyone who wishes to be out of touch with reality.
And that prepares them perfectly for a career in journalism in this age where people pick their news source based on how well it jives with their political beliefs, never having to read news articles that might challenge them.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Did anyone else notice that all three articles (from A to B to C) had to do with gold? I wonder if that was a defined theme for the class and what other articles got written by the same theme.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I just clicked on bimetallism and ended up going on a wikipedia Link Click-a-thon for a good 30 minutes and ended up reading about the "Nixon Shock", "Revenue act of 1917", "Treasury Security", and "West Germany".
Wikipedia just isn't good for people with ADD because you can sit there clicking links all day.
I admit, I love the idea and would be willing to agree to it for a class--but I don't like the precedent. Much like professors that have attempted to begin the semester with a syllabus claiming copyright over all homework submissions and projects...or an associate I know who had a professor refuse to grade a project until he signed over copyright... I find this notion...absurdly offensive and professionally inappropriate.
They should require that students deliver the article, and could justifiably offer some appropriate incentives for upload to wikipedia. Since wikipedia basically requires me to give up my exclusive copyright on content I submit--it is not appropriate for a required class activity.
This should never, ever, be required.
I had to do the same thing, only for the 'local' version of Wikipedia. I actually did some research that expanded the article beyond what is in the 'original' (I mention that because most of my esteemed colleagues simply c/p and translated...poorly).
Did they teach these future *cough* journallists how to copy and paste, thus avoiding the embarrassing mistake of spelling a word wrong that's not only in the article they're linking to, but part of the URFL?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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I always look for the stupidest post I can find in a /. discussion and reply to it, just to show the author how f@#$ing retarded he is.
This has been done a while ago on the Portuguese Wikipedia.
A professor from a Lisbon university assigned projects in 2008 and 2009 for students to write and/or develop articles about Logistics. Students would create accounts, write articles as well as they could according to project policies (the teacher had the care to expose the main editing policies on the project presentation page), and that work would count on their final grade. The whole thing was quite well planed, of course many things had to be adjusted along the way, but that's always the case on Wikipedias.
Now imagine ~20 clueless new users starting articles without much content and not really writing so much that older users could realise it was valuable content... yes, a lot of it went through deletion requests, there was discussion in the community about whether to allow projects of this nature go on or not...
In the end, after a lot of lack of proper communication, and too many impatient people involved in the problem, the professor turned into a troll and was blocked a number of times.
I could write quite a lot about how there is a clash of cultures between new users and the established ones, but I'd bore you lot.
Ex-pt.wp user.
Stupid git.
It works well, because students can fill in details on sometimes obscure, but still notable, topics -- e.g., plot summaries of films. Plus, since they're reading original sources for my courses, they can also cite those sources, as Wikipedia policy demands. They submit the URLs of the articles they've modified/created to me and I always check them for accuracy and proper wiki-style.
In addition to increasing Wikipedia's breadth/depth on film/TV topics, it encourages students to get involved in the Wikipedia-editing process.
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com
That's nothing new.
In my campus (I'm studying computer engineerging at spain, UdG university) we did the same thing. In fact, it has been done for many years now.