On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
When professors and lecturers assign editing Wikipedia to a group of students, our reaction is often not favorable. I've recently had a long series of e-mails with lecturers at the University of Scotland and Macquarie University in Australia about an assignment that was repeated at Macquarie in three terms.
When the link between the student accounts was discovered recently, it turned into a long thread at AN/I where a number of unfriendly things were said about both the students and the lecturers - and the students' editing, which wasn't (I think) below what we would expect from new editors, was treated as a serious problem to be dealt with by blocks and rangeblocks if necessary.
If our response to coordinated student editing is dismissive or punitive, and it often is, then we should not be encouraging educators to assign it to their students.
Nathan
Yuck. It's hard enough to help professors do the right thing (I just got back from giving a couple of classroom lectures about wikipedia) when they are so often clueless about how wikipedia works anyway, without extra complications from overzealous admins.
There's a group of people listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects who are ready and willing to help with monitoring and cleaning up after such assignments, and helping craft them as well.
-- phoebe