[WikiEN-l] Future avenues of garnering participation; or, How Wikipedia is currently a crappy/crack-tastic game

[Ray Saintonge]

maru dubshinki wrote:

> Well, I was trying for a funny conclusion there. I doubt we could turn
>
>*all* of Wikipedia into a game - how would that even work, anyway?
>You'd have people presented random paragraphs and asked where the
>error is (in some cases added by computer, and in some cases not)?
>That's the best I can come up with anyway, although it might be
>interesting to have competitive article writing-based games - but
>rather that we might as well formalize some otherwise tedious and
>repetitve aspects of Wikipedia that do need to get done and put them
>in game form so they can get done and free up editor effort for more
>worthwhile things like writing new articles or rewriting old ones.
>
Why does the game need to be competitive?

A game that teaches co-operative skills in developing an article would 
be a very helpful educational tool. 

Each student uses the Random article generator (perhaps with the help of 
a bot) to generate a list of ten articles that already exist on 
Wikipedia.  He does not see the articles, only the titles.  He then 
proceeds to write a first draft of an article on a chosen topic from 
that list.  He uploads the article to a local wiki where the other 
students can view and edit the article.  Marks can be allocated for 
different types of writing and editing, including big marks for 
achieving NPOV on a controversial topic and marks taken off for getting 
into an edit war.

Ec