Hi,
On Sun, Jul 03, 2011 at 12:14:39AM +0400, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
On Sat, 2 Jul 2011 13:49:58 -0600 (MDT),
"Fred Bauder"
<fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
We should do this before some aggressive outfit
like Wikinfo jumps
in...
It wouldn't be an anyone can edit wiki. Only
authorized student
accounts
could edit. It would be a teaching tool.
To do this is not a big deal, but it would only have an added value for
us
if the result could be somehow merged into Wikipedia once the
assessment
has been completed. It is not difficult to organize, but it requires
some
preliminary planning (only articles absent in Wikipedia would be
assigned?
What if they did not exist at the time of the assignment but were
created
before the assessment? Who will merge? etc).
Sorry to dampen things, but as we're proposing "what if"s, what if some
of Wikipedia's material was copied to it and it just became a kind of
duplicate of Wikipedia run, as proposed, by the WMF? There would be
admins etc, but
run by students for students: that's not always a good thing. With
regard to what you said about maybe only articles absent in Wikipedia
would be
assigned, that's a good idea (it avoids the direct "what if" mentioned
above),
but an assignment you can't straight to a Wikipedia article for
information but actually have to go browsing the web for? That would
horrify many students I know. ;-)
It's definitely a good idea though, I'm not disputing that. I'd
certainly get involved!
Disclaimer: I am a student. :-)
Isabell.
3rd grade, or post-graduate? Well, the existence of a Wikipedia article
on almost any subject is always going to be there, no matter what kind of
writing exercise students participate in. Great assignments will be about
subjects our regular editors don't have much interest in but students do,
ephemeral, topical subjects.
Copying from or using Wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia, as a source
would diminish rather than increase evaluation of work; that is pretty
much standard practice anyway.
Fred