Not only is there a Wikipedia page about the subject, there's also a group of Wikipedians who are ready and willing to help out with assignments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Classroom_coordination The main things to remember is that Wikipedia is not a controlled environment -- students will be interacting with other editors who neither know (nor care) that they are students, and that there are very definite rules for editing -- verifiability, no original research, and npov need to be followed. Encyclopedic writing is also very different from most academic writing, and can be difficult even for experienced authors to do well. If students approach working on a Wikipedia article like working on a typical school paper where you make an argument based on limited research, they will run into trouble. There's a short appendix on using and assigning Wikipedia in the book I recently published, "How Wikipedia Works." You can read it here -- http://howwikipediaworks.com/apb.html. best regards, Phoebe On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Michael Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I would also like to hear about people's experiences with assigning projects that involve creating/editing WP content.
To that end, there is a WP page dedicated to its use in school projects: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects>
-mz
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Associate, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Nov 10, 2008, at 2:44 PM, David M Silver wrote:
aoir people,
has anyone had any experience with assigning students the task of altering, improving, and tweaking their university page on wikipedia? in other words, has anyone assigned their college/university wikipedia page as a site of construction for a class? if so, i'm curious to hear any anecdotes, experiences, best-practices, relevant readings, and anything else you wish to share.
david silver http://silverinsf.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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