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. :)
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]]
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado) University of Hong Kong
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:44:59 +0000, Duncan Harris dunc_harris@hotmail.com wrote:
I've gone through most of these article, cross referencing all those on vfd. Some are pretty good, only needing minor sweeps, but for every good article, there's atleast one bad one. The pcw has a responsibility to provide us with a list of articles worked on. He can accept what twaddle he likes for his assignment, but yes this does reflect badly on him and the university (especially with one idiot trying to defend the reserve football team by impersonating RickK). I think people sweeping this rubbish should give themselves a round of applaus. pcw should be warned not to attempt this again in a similar form unless he changes the wording of his assignment, as it may constitute organised vandalism.
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