A preprint has been published about the Association for Psychological
Science's Wikipedia initiative on editing assignments:
Rosta Farzan, Robert E. Kraut: "Wikipedia Classroom Experiment:
bidirectional benefits of students’ engagement in online production
communities" CHI’13, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France.
http://oracli.com/files/research/other-fields/farzan-APSWI-CHI2013.pdf
From the abstract:
"...This paper describes
a project to support students’
writing of scientific articles in Wikipedia. In collaboration
with a scientific association, we involved 640 students from
36 courses in editing scientific articles on Wikipedia. This
paper provides details on design of the program and our quan-
titative and qualitative approaches to evaluating it. Our result
shows that the Wikipedia classroom experiment benefits both
the Wikipedia community and students. Undergraduate and
graduate students substantially improved the scientific con-
tent of over 800 articles, at a level of quality indistinguishable
from content written by PhD experts. Both students and fac-
ulty endorsed the motivational benefits of an authentic writing
experience that would be read by thousands of people."
The paper also contains a section on "Community acceptance".
If you pardon the advertising, we will see to cover this paper - as
previously others about the education program - in the February issue
of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter - contributions
are always welcome; see the instructions there).
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation