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