On 10/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
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
There's plenty for uni students. Biology and history have massive numbers of articles to be written. And hey, yesterday, I stumbled across [[Tommy Langan]], apparently one of the 15 best Gaelic footballers ever, who has one line on him. Maybe there's not much truly generalist low hanging fruit that could be attacked by a primary school student, but delve even slightly into a specialist area, and there is tons.
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.
That's a much better idea than letting students pick their own topics.
Another approach: see all those lists of missing encyclopedic
articles? Same thing: research and summary.
That's what I do.
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.
The only challenge is finding topics that would be suitable for students
to write about...that would actually demonstrate research skills, knowledge of the subject etc. I guess they could submit proposals and the teacher could decide if they liked the topic.
I don't think any of the subjects I did at uni would have been very conducive to this. Maybe a first year essay "The history of English orthography", but after that it was always very particular analysis, argumentation etc.
Steve