David Gerard wrote:
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.
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.
Ec