On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:25:12 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
As someone who has used WP in teaching before, I must say the wording of the assignment is quite terse, and likely inadequate. It's not clear what the goal is - article writing, learning markup, interaction with Wikipedians, learning NPOV, etc. An assignment which is too open ended or too loosely defined results in exactly what we see - a selection of articles (sadly) consistent with stereotypes of Dartmouth such as beer pong, ski team, fraternities. No wonder folks early on felt it was troll bait. :)
As a recent college grad, I can confirm that neither beer pong, ski teams, nor fraternities are unique to Dartmouth :).
In the future, a better option would be to put up constraints or "bumper guards", such as pointing to existing WP lists as a starting point. Suggestions include:
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs]] [[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]] [[Special:Shortpages]]
Or, tell students to link in at least "N" number of articles in: [[Wikipedia:Orphaned_Articles]]
I've started a new section with these in [[Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects#Considerations_and_suggestions]]
Good thought. The vast majority of student work is positive contributions; some of your students, I've noticed, have problems with copyright, which may be cultural, or simple carelessness - but they added original content. An assignment to "create two articles" _will_ lead to things like articles on drinking games, if only because students can't think of subjects we don't cover.
Nathan/Pakaran