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

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 11:33:49PM -0700, Delirium wrote:
> David Gerard 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
> > before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just
> > waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an
> > article. Someone with university-level research facilities should be
> > able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much
> > more time.
> >   
> 
> If you pick the right subject, there are many not-too-obscure areas 
> where the low-hanging fruit will bury you up to your neck. I've been 
> doing some checking of our biography coverage and it's surprisingly weak 
> despite our huge numbers of biographies, I guess because there are an 
> even more huge number of notable people. Browsing through a PD version 
> of _Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians_ (1919), we're missing 
> articles on *almost all* of the people in it! From spot-checking I'd say 
> we cover maybe 15-20% at best. Similar results can be found if you scan 
> through the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (UK) or, even more 
> strikingly, any of the major German biographical dictionaries. And those 
> are all western examples; our coverage of Indian biographies is even 
> worse---we don't even have articles on all *current* members of India's 
> parliament, let alone those from even as recently as the 1990s. So if 
> you pick the right area, like say "Indian politics", you should find 
> most of the articles still waiting to be written, with the exception of 
> a handful of the top-tier most famous people.

Other areas are scientists. We still are not covering all Fellows of the
Royal Society, the US Academy of Sciences or the Australian Academy of
Sciences. 

Brian.
 
> -Mark
> 
> 
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-- 
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au  
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity