On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@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_arti...
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.
- d.