[WikiEN-l] Ars Technica: Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

[David Gerard]

On 30/10/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/10/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The idea is noble, but without a bit of thought about how the paper is going
> > to fit in with Wikipedia, it's a bit like donating an elephant to a charity.

> A white elephant, indeed. Except that it's counterproductive for the
> donor, as well...
> In general, I'd go so far as to say that our first reaction to someone
> suggesting something like this should be to *discourage* it - it isn't
> that we don't like the idea of more contributions, but the fact that
> we have our own routine and our own direction means that the
> contributions tend not to get dealt with in a very helpful manner as
> far as the institution's concerned. They may be deleted out of hand,
> they may be swiftly rewritten, moved to a different name, reverted...
> any number of things that make it hard to determine if your students
> actually did the work.


Mmm. I do like the fact that significant numbers of the contributions
actually stuck. And that the students got to deal with interacting
with real people in the real world on a real project.

I can see something like this working if the area is carefully
selected. There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here
before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just
waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an
article. Someone with university-level research facilities should be
able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much
more time.

Possible approach: find a WikiProject that you know the research
material will be there for. Set the students to work filling out those
requested article links.

Another approach: see all those lists of missing encyclopedic
articles? Same thing: research and summary.

This would add lots of good and useful encyclopedic content without
running much risk of getting up Wikipedians' noses or horrifying the
students or their professor.


- d.