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
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:34 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://social.mis.temple.edu/happyhourand20minutes/2008/11/25/extra-credit-2...
I like this.
- d.
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2008/11/26 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
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.
It depends on the quality of the assignment they give. I liked this one because it was "You have to make an actual good addition, no foolin'." We've had other student editing projects that have resulted in fantastically good new material. YMMV, but I certainly wouldn't regard it as an intrinsically bad idea.
- d.
2008/11/26 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
It depends on the quality of the assignment they give. I liked this one because it was "You have to make an actual good addition, no foolin'." We've had other student editing projects that have resulted in fantastically good new material. YMMV, but I certainly wouldn't regard it as an intrinsically bad idea.
The problem with that is that adding that King Charles II had a royal yacht called Fubbs (entirely true) to the King Charles II article May well be viewed as a good addition by a third party but less to by wikipedia.
On 11/26/08, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
The problem with that is that adding that King Charles II had a royal yacht called Fubbs (entirely true) to the King Charles II article May well be viewed as a good addition by a third party but less to by wikipedia.
Mostly because he had 24 other yachts with equally silly names. I'd argue that the biography article should at least link to that list.
—C.W.
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:23 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/26 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
It depends on the quality of the assignment they give. I liked this one because it was "You have to make an actual good addition, no foolin'." We've had other student editing projects that have resulted in fantastically good new material. YMMV, but I certainly wouldn't regard it as an intrinsically bad idea.
The problem with that is that adding that King Charles II had a royal yacht called Fubbs (entirely true) to the King Charles II article May well be viewed as a good addition by a third party but less to by wikipedia.
This I think depends on what is considered a good edit. I can imagine a teacher giving an assignment that they need to produce a good edit with proper references. And for a 2nd or 3rd assignment, that the edit remain in the article in question for at least 2 weeks or some other time period. I would hope that they would have the students read some standard policies like Wikipedia:Verifiabilityhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability and WP:NPOV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view and probably Wikipedia:Editing policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy .
Another part of the assignment I'd like to see is that they need to edit an article related to something they are learning in class rather than a random article.
I'd like to see teachers do more of this - it helps the students many ways but there two skills that I think are essential that they learn: 1) It helps them understand how wikipedia is edited and how to evaluate the status/current verifiability of a wikipedia article - thus they can better evaluate the information they read in other wikipedia articles 2) It forces them to do research and figure out how to research information (even if only starting with the wikipedia article itself)
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