[WikiEN-l] Ars Technica: Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

[Steve Bennett]

On 10/30/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I can see something like this working if the area is carefully
> selected. There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here


There's plenty for uni students. Biology and history have massive
numbers of articles to be written.
And hey, yesterday, I stumbled across [[Tommy Langan]], apparently one of
the 15 best Gaelic footballers ever, who has one line on him. Maybe there's
not much truly generalist low hanging fruit
that could be attacked by a primary school student, but delve even slightly
into a specialist area,
and there is tons.


> Possible approach: find a WikiProject that you know the research
> material will be there for. Set the students to work filling out those
> requested article links.


That's a much better idea than letting students pick their own topics.

Another approach: see all those lists of missing encyclopedic
> articles? Same thing: research and summary.


That's what I do.

This would add lots of good and useful encyclopedic content without
> running much risk of getting up Wikipedians' noses or horrifying the
> students or their professor.
>
> The only challenge is finding topics that would be suitable for students
to write about...that would actually demonstrate research skills, knowledge
of the subject etc. I guess they could submit proposals and the teacher
could decide if they liked the topic.

I don't think any of the subjects I did at uni would have been very
conducive to this. Maybe a first year essay "The history of English
orthography", but after that it was always very particular analysis,
argumentation etc.

Steve