[Air-L] assigning students their college/university wikipedia page

[phoebe ayers]

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 at 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 at 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
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