[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Lesson Plan

[Charles Matthews]

Fred Bauder wrote:
>> Fred Bauder wrote:
>>     
>>> http://weblogg-ed.com/2005/wikipedia-lesson-plan/
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> Indeed, must have worked very well, since as of 2009 [[horse]] has 211
>> references, an advance on 0 when that was written.
>>
>> I encountered a group of college students editing a somewhat neglected
>> article I had started, encouraged by a professor who had set groups the
>> task of improving historical pages. The article was better than before,
>> but there were some basic issues with what they did that required a
>> little more than the addition of "house style" by me.
>>
>> Charles
>>     
>
> No surprise there; you're an experienced Wikipedia editor, and with lots
> of additional material to work with, can do much better than a bunch of
> newbies, however scholarly.
>   
No, I meant something a bit different. The article you posted seemed to 
take the epistemology as the basic "lesson": if you tell me we "know" 
that, what do you mean by "know"? It's a reasonable assumption that 
being analytical about how something in an encyclopedia article can be 
described as "known" would prove educational, say in the early teenage 
years. The article was on the first poetry anthology published in 
English, and the question I would have is more about general relevance 
of content. Just one statement: the first edition had many poems 
containing religious commentary that were taken out in later editions. 
OK, fine, if you know the publication date was 1557, the year before 
Mary Tudor died, you are going to ask more and different questions, not 
just "how do we know that?" which can probably be established by putting 
two books side by side. (This is about [[Tottel's Miscellany]], by the way.)

Charles