[Foundation-l] Term papers on Wikipedia

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

Ray Saintonge a écrit :
> David Gerard wrote:
>> On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at 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_articles
>>
>> 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
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