[Air-L] assigning wikipedia

[Joseph Reagle]

On Tuesday 11 November 2008, you wrote:
> One of the problems with Wikipedia's own catalogue of academic  
> assignments is that the guide to WP writing insists on objective  
> neutrality,

On this front, I teach a class on Conflict Management and the students read my chapter on Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View and Assume Good Faith as cultural norms facilitating the productive management of conflict. As an exercise yesterday, the students broke up into groups, identified some sort of contentious issue, and wrote both a "biased" and "neutral" stub on that topic. I think it worked pretty well -- and I was intrigued by the results -- in communicating what is at the heart of Wikipedia, and adding another sense of the word "neutral" in the conflict literature. (Neutral is used by some to indicate un-empathic alienated speech, and by others as productively descriptive speech without negative emotional residues.)