[WikiEN-l] Make your students edit Wikipedia for extra credit

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> When professors and lecturers assign editing Wikipedia to a group of
> students, our reaction is often not favorable. I've recently had a long
> series of e-mails with lecturers at the University of Scotland and Macquarie
> University in Australia about an assignment that was repeated at Macquarie
> in three terms.
>
> When the link between the student accounts was discovered recently, it
> turned into a long thread at AN/I where a number of unfriendly things were
> said about both the students and the lecturers - and the students' editing,
> which wasn't (I think) below what we would expect from new editors, was
> treated as a serious problem to be dealt with by blocks and rangeblocks if
> necessary.
>
> If our response to coordinated student editing is dismissive or punitive,
> and it often is, then we should not be encouraging educators to assign it to
> their students.
>
> Nathan

Yuck. It's hard enough to help professors do the right thing (I just
got back from giving a couple of classroom lectures about wikipedia)
when they are so often clueless about how wikipedia works anyway,
without extra complications from overzealous admins.

There's a group of people listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
who are ready and willing to help with monitoring and cleaning up
after such assignments, and helping craft them as well.

-- phoebe