On 10/30/07, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Tuesday 30 October 2007 16:23, Brian McNeil wrote:
A U.S. professor assigned her students the task of creating entries on WP instead of term papers.
We're actually doing this in Serbian Wikipedia for a while :)
A number of other courses have done this as well (including one that I managed, and hopefully another one this coming Spring); see WP:SUP and WikiProject Classroom coordination. But the more attention this kind of thing gets, the better.
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).
For someone willing to seek out and contact a good number of professor who have run Wikipedia assignments (there are a lot out there that don't appear in news articles but can be found with creative web search queries), there is definitely a good Wikinews story. I did something similar for the Signpost last year ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-12-26/Wikiped... ) but since then I think the number of people running such assignments has increased substantially.
-Sage