maru dubshinki wrote:
On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Each student uses the Random article generator (perhaps with the help of a bot) to generate a list of ten articles that already exist on Wikipedia. He does not see the articles, only the titles. He then proceeds to write a first draft of an article on a chosen topic from that list. He uploads the article to a local wiki where the other students can view and edit the article. Marks can be allocated for different types of writing and editing, including big marks for achieving NPOV on a controversial topic and marks taken off for getting into an edit war.
Meh. Edit wars are hard to generate on a small wiki AFAIK, and if the other editors are fellow students, I don't see'em lasting long. Wouldn't it be more effective to draw on the lists-of-missing-articles like the Missing Encyclopedic Articles Project maintains, and get the feedback from Wikipedia at large? Feed'em through Peer Review, if normal processes aren't enough.
A couple years ago a professor at Dartmouth had his students put articles on Wikipedia as part of a class project. These kids promprtly fell into the notability meat grinder. While it would obviously benefit Wikipedia to generate articles from that list, I don't think that that many of these kids are ready for some of the abuse that's so frequently doled out. Such abuse does nothing to encourage co-operative work among people who might never edit Wikipedia anyway.
Ec