A U.S. professor assigned her students the task of creating entries on WP instead of term papers.
Presentation: http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=11073 http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=11073&PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS089& bhcp=1 &PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS089&bhcp=1
News report: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071030-prof-replaces-term-papers-with -wikipedia-contributions.html
I know I will get complaints on Wikinews about doing another WMF story so soon, but apart from the little donation I put in I think plugging the projects is a good way to help the fundraiser.
Brian.
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
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.
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
We also need to emphasize transparency on the talk pages, so we know whom to contact. Some of the teachers involved have reported considerable difficulty in finding encyclopedic topics, and anyone with experience at WP could surely help them there. There's a tendency to try for traditional term paper topics, which can often end up as OR, when things like bios of people involved in whatever the course topic is can be more suitable. And of course everyone involved must realise there is no way of preventing others from editing during the term. But if they pick out-of-the-way people, this shouldn't be a real difficulty. It also appears to my continuing dismay --but certainly not surprise ---as a librarian, that many of the teachers involved haven't the least idea of how to do references, or sometimes even the need for it. I say "teachers"--for it is not the fault of their students.
On 10/30/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
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
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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... les
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.
on 10/30/07 11:37 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge@telus.net wrote:
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.
Yes, Ray. Besides becoming a less and less pleasant place be and to work in, we are providing our detractors with an awful lot of fuel. And how do you encourage someone to join the Project when you have to tell them to bring along a helmet and padding?
A problem appears to be that any subject or posting related to the social environment within the Project seems to be taboo. I have noticed that, on the Wikien-L List (which is the one with which I am most familiar), the subject that many people reject the most, and declare "off-topic", and "not appropriate for the List" are those posts related to the Community itself. The participants appear very uncomfortable talking about interpersonal issues related to the Project. This has a great deal to do with the emotional age of many of the participants. This can be solved by those who are more comfortable with the subject raising the issues, and being patient with those who have more trouble with it.
The more we take care of our own Community, the less vulnerable it will be to those who would want to destroy it.
Marc Riddell
Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
Hmm, what sorts of articles are students writing that leads to that sort of argumentation? I write lots of missing articles and rarely really run into *anybody* commenting, positively or negatively---I have some articles I wrote 2-3 years ago that have no talk-page comments, and no edits besides rewording and category shuffling. It seems that writing few paragraphs with a few references on a random subject that is usually relatively obscure (or it would've had an article already) doesn't raise many eyebrows.
Are these getting more criticism because the editors explicitly identify themselves as doing a term project (so people give the contributions extra scrutiny), or are they trying to write contentious articles like major overviews instead of more narrow stuff? If it's the latter, we might want to guide people away from that---if you want to start writing about, say, philosophy on Wikipedia, the easiest path IMO is to start with a narrow, well-defined topic, or biography of a relatively minor figure, in order to get an idea of how the process works. Starting with The One True Overview of some broad area of the subject as a first article is much more likely to run into trouble.
-Mark
Hello,
Ray Saintonge a écrit :
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.
Agreed. I helped a teacher doing such an experiment in a French school in 2005 (students aged 16-17). The subject (marketing and client resource management) had almost not coverage in Wikipedia at that time. However the feedback was rather agressive and not helpful, so the experience was not repeated. The social environment in the French Wikipedia has not improve (understatement), so I would not do this again today.
Ec
Regards,
Yann
On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 16:23 +0100, Brian McNeil wrote:
A U.S. professor assigned her students the task of creating entries on WP instead of term papers.
.........
There's a thread on WikiEN-l about this: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-October/084463.html
(I have no idea why the original message isn't displaying in the archive.)
KTC
This is the other link to look at...
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2497
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Kwan Ting Chan Sent: 30 October 2007 16:45 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Term papers on Wikipedia
On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 16:23 +0100, Brian McNeil wrote:
A U.S. professor assigned her students the task of creating entries on WP instead of term papers.
.........
There's a thread on WikiEN-l about this: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-October/084463.html
(I have no idea why the original message isn't displaying in the archive.)
KTC
On 10/30/07, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
This is the other link to look at...
And this, a more substantial piece: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/wikipedia
-Sage
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