On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross
<ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From what I've seen surveying the various
classroom projects people
have tried, the most successful are ones where some effort is made to
screen topics for encyclopedicity and gaps in Wikipedia's coverage,
and/or the assignments are focused on interacting with the Wikipedia
community (i.e., content is posted early and students follow the fate
of their work over the semester).
Yes. Rather than just telling the students "go write something",
send
them to a wikiproject's list of redlinks, or to the missing articles
project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_art…
With university research facilities onhand, writing some decent
articles with good references shouldn't be much work at all. We'll get
more good content and they'll get a good introductory experience to
Wikipedia.
Indeed, and this sort of thing should be encouraged, and we need to
accept that some contributions will be dogs. Nevertheless, the social
graces of some of the people who review these contributions leave much
to be desired. They do little to help these people to improve their
contributions.
There was a time when the primary outside criticism of Wikipedia had to
do with the accuracy of contents. I seem to encounter more these days
about the social environment. It would be great if more Wikipedians
understood the implications of that.