[Foundation-l] Term papers on Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

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.

Ec