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

[Jim]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:23 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/11/26 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> > It depends on the quality of the assignment they give. I liked this
> > one because it was "You have to make an actual good addition, no
> > foolin'." We've had other student editing projects that have resulted
> > in fantastically good new material. YMMV, but I certainly wouldn't
> > regard it as an intrinsically bad idea.
>
> The problem with that is that adding that King Charles II had a royal
> yacht called Fubbs (entirely true) to the King Charles II article May
> well be viewed as a good addition by a third party but less to by
> wikipedia.


This I think depends on what is considered a good edit. I can imagine a
teacher giving an assignment that they need to produce a good edit with
proper references. And for a 2nd or 3rd assignment, that the edit remain in
the article in question for at least 2 weeks or some other time period. I
would hope that they would have the students read some standard policies
like Wikipedia:Verifiability<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability>
 and
WP:NPOV <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view> and
probably Wikipedia:Editing
policy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy>
.

Another part of the assignment I'd like to see is that they need to edit an
article related to something they are learning in class rather than a random
article.

I'd like to see teachers do more of this - it helps the students many ways
but there two skills that I think are essential that they learn:
1) It helps them understand how wikipedia is edited and how to evaluate the
status/current verifiability of a wikipedia article - thus they can better
evaluate the information they read in other wikipedia articles
2) It forces them to do research and figure out how to research information
(even if only starting with the wikipedia article itself)