Just a small correction... Brion Vibber is far from a former editor; he's actually the current CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, responsible for technical maintenance of the servers and MediaWiki. He's made comments in the past about how Wikipedia is like a giant MMORPG for some users -- but it's as someone intimately familiar with how Wikipedia works inside and out. My own view is of course Wikipedia is entertaining to work on -- that's a big part of why so many people devote so many hours to it. But you are very right that those people are self-selected. On the other hand, the argument can be made that academics (and everyone, really) should have a responsibility to help keep up Wikipedia in their subject area. When students work on Wikipedia they have the potential to mess around in the real world and cause difficulties for the site, but also to make more of a difference than they would with any assignment like a paper that would never leave the classroom. That can be inspiring to many students. It just takes a lot of preparation on the part of everyone involved (see the Murray essay I posted in my last message). -- Phoebe On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Margie Borschke <margieborschke@iinet.net.au> wrote:
It strikes me as almost appropriate that students who are required to edit a Wikipedia entry as part of a class, ended up vandalizing pages. I think you could argue that it is a valid response to being forced into public participation, particularly in the context of a self-organising community where all the other participants are self selected. If you'd not edited Wikipedia before, wouldn't boundaries be the first thing you'd want to test? What would Cartman do? I assure you he's not going to try the sandbox first.
I think a lot of students would also 'get' that in addition to being a knowledge resource, wikipedia is also a kind of game, something former Wikipedia editor Brion Vibber pointed out in Nicholson Baker's NY Review of Books article, The Charms of Wikipedia.
While there are clearly good pedagogical uses of Wikipedia, required editing makes me uneasy. It's not so great for students to have to learn in public and not so great for the people participating to have a group of students descend upon them either.
--Margie Borschke _______________________________________________ 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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