Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles

openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."

Doublt benefit..

And when the wikipedia admins come through and start wholesale editing or deleting articles, and then banning them when they try to defend their changes, they will also get a lesson in what happens when online communities start losing track of their core mission and are taken over by people with exaggerated egos and an axe to grind.

Oh, wait. This is slashdot. No one here has any idea what I'm talking about. Nevermind. :)

Linda Mack!

Obviously they weren't writing about Lockerbie Scotland (see Admin Slimvirgin aka the intelligence agent Linda Mack), or Circumcision (see admin Jayg). Or wrote something either of these admins felt was not notable, and deleted wholesale.

I'm tripping over myself to donate more money to WalesCultBomisOPedia!

Re:Doublt benefit..

Heh. And might I point out that whomever moderated that last post "flamebait" just proved my point? :)

Oh, the irony.

Re:Doublt benefit..

Yeah, I've noticed wikipedia is becoming more like that lately. Like, someone thinks it's their duty to go through every article and say "trivia sections are discouraged" or other nonsense little warnings that don't contribute anything to the article. All because it's some inside knowledge that they think they are so great they know all these "rules" about wikipedia and try to make you follow them.

Re:

Excellent sarcasm, but that's not what I'm referring to. I don't care about the little warnings and stuff, and I don't like vandalism any more than anyone else. In fact, there was one page that someone kept vandalizing that I tried very hard to get unvan

Re:

I don't DISAGREE with you, but you could see such things as being like bug tracking software or //TODO's in code.

Things that otherwise wouldn't get fixed, get fixed when someone is bored.

Re:Doublt benefit..

[Citation Needed]

Re:Doublt benefit..

Just because you could not express your disagreement with others in a manner that others view as respectful (and as a result likely got yourself banned from Wikipedia) doesn't mean that these students will too. When people act like trolls, push their POVs over everyone else, and refuse to even debate the issue with others without engaging in massive revert-wars, they generally get banned, and then they go post their whines here on Slashdot.

Even though there are cases in which other users and admins go too far, one has to learn that the most important skill of being a Wikipedian is to know when to stop arguing and calm the fuck down. Almost everyone who I see get banned for edit-warring is because they refuse to do this.

Re:Doublt benefit..

FR.TED: What does it do?
DOUGAL: Squeeze it there. It's a joke telephone.
FR.TED: Dougal. This is a dog toy.
DOUGAL: What? No it's not Ted, it's a joke telephone.
FR.TED: Dougal this is a toy for dogs. This is something people give dogs on their birthday.
DOUGAL: Now seriously Ted, it's a joke telephone. You just give it to someone and tell them it's a phone and they'll try to make a call on it.
FR.TED: Dougal, who would think this was a telephone? Even a dog knows this isn't a phone.
DOUGAL: Eh..Ted... We'll agree to differ alright.
FR.TED: No we won't agree to differ, because you're very very wrong. Look, does the picture on the on the packet not give you a clue. Why do you think the dog is so happy? He's happy because someone has given him a yellow rubber telephone that makes a noise.
DOUGAL: No! No! He's laughing because some one's trying to make a call on the phone - and now look, I am banning you so I guess I win.. Its a joke telephone and thats all that will be said on the matter.

Re:Doublt benefit..

Depends. Was the assignment more flexible, asking students to add, say, 500 words to one or more existing articles? If so, did the teacher point out that there are many many articles [wikipedia.org] that need to be expanded, and admins are likely to leave you alone on those. (the decision to add or delete individual paragraphs is a non-admin one, unless the editors aren't able to work together and start an edit war [wikipedia.org]... in which case, admins should still be largely uninvolved other than protecting the page for a number of days to give the participants time to discuss the issue)

Even if the assignment was to create a completely new article, the teacher could have pointed them to the most wanted articles [wikipedia.org] list... any article created that has a ton of backlinks is less likely to be deleted just based on the number of backlinks, and is also more likely to be more obviously notable.

Re:

Yeah. There are some good teachers, and there are some really bad ones. What the really bad ones could do with wikipedia really scares me.

Mix wikipedia editing and zero tolerance policies and things could get really dicey really fast.

Re:Doublt benefit..

What the good ones can do with Wikipedia is incredibly inspiring. A good friend of mine teaches High School in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn -- pretty much "the hood." He's a tall white anarchist with big hair. Try to imagine this classroom; it involves a lot of true stereotypes. But what does NOT fit the stereotype is that he started a class wiki, and has all his students contribute to it. Instead of a total mess, instead of abuse, graffiti and sludge, it's raised the level of ALL the students. It's a peer environment: once it becomes cool to do it right, to BE right, abuse and problems dry up almost completely.

This is an incredibly exciting new paradigm of teaching, because it puts the power of education directly into the students' hands. Education no longer needs to be a fount that springs forth from some "authority," it can be something that brings authority to the student. And the best part is the huge "fuck you" to the older generation of jaded "educators" (read: administrators), who would NEVER have tried such a thing, expecting only the worst. Instead it has completely revolutionized his classroom. Sure, there are kids with serious problems that aren't getting solved by a class wiki, and no one expects it to. But for the students at large, this is a BIG deal. And they LOVE it! Think of how many potential writers, poets, researchers, who knows, can be encouraged by just having a chance to write on a little webpage, developing the bravery to put it out there among their friends and enemies.

It's truly inspiring.

--Ted

Re:Doublt benefit..

Guess what? Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them? Hell no - it's a condition of their employment that they produce a quantity of quality writing and original research. Or, to look at it another way, it's what academics do.

Such writing is often under time pressure - that doesn't mean it ends up being plagiarized, or a pack of lies, or 'just' journalism as you imply.

One reason this project works - one reason it's a good exercise to put students through - is that it forces them to synthesize their knowledge on a subject and practice writing in a vigorous, academic style, with the benefits of peer-review, but without the pressure of formal publication.

You missed the point

The assignment may very well be good for the student, but not necessarily good for Wikipedia.

Re:You missed the point

I disagree. A significant amount of it will be good. Some of it will be bad, but probably not very much. If the prof is teaching the course this quarter, she'll probably be teaching it next year at the same time. If she doesn't cull / correct the bad articles, she can re-assign students to fix 'em. Great thing about Wikipedia -- once there's an article, it gets seen and edited by a handful, to dozens of people, depending on the subject matter. So even a crappy article can be made awesome. This is definately a good thing.

Re:Doublt benefit..

Surprise surprise,

- Wikipedia does NOT require that contributors have background knowledge (and that's by design, if you want otherwise go to Citizendium),
- the teacher is supervising their students' work, so I would expect the contributions from their students to be of better average value than the average wikipedia post.
- anything that is not of encyclopedic value should be corrected by the community. That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work, not by dictating arbitrary rules about who should or shouldn't contribute based on someone's expectations about the quality of anybody else's work.

Re:Double benefit..

I'll come out of the closet here. I have assigned this to my students in advanced courses as well. But I always make it optional. Students have a choice: write up lecture notes for one lecture to share with their fellow students in class or find an article related to the course material in Wikipedia and improve it substantially.

My experience has been that those that do this have made very nice contributions for the community. I check up on it to make sure that it is not confused. Of course, I have only tried this in the relatively small classes that we have here at Berkeley.

The academic world is about the developing and sharing of knowledge with our fellow human beings. Wikipedia seems like one of the right ways to do this for well established results with immediate benefits and very little pain.

Re:Doublt benefit..

I was going to moderate your comment down, but instead, fine: I'll rise to the bait. Frankly, your comment isn't very insightful, and it doesn't inspire much conversation. You're simply not as thought provoking as you apparently think that you are. Maybe that's what behind your moderation, instead of some vast /. groupthink. Even if your point has a shred of interesting commentary, you lose that behind aggressive and inflammatory language. There is a way to make a point without using insulting language. If anything, it's for the tone, and not the comment, for which you will be modded down. Finally, if you don't like /., go start your own site. Start a blog, call it wiki-hater-blog, whatever. Then you can write whatever you like, and if people find you interesting they'll read your comments, drive ad revenue to you, leave comments, etc. There. There's your conversation. Fun, huh?

Makes sense

I remember reading an article about one of the top contributors on Wikipedia - he started out by writing entries as a study aid. Makes sense to me.

Re:Makes sense

That's not surprising. A good way of consolidating any learning (or at least confirming what you've learned), is to attempt to explain/pass-it-on to another individual. If they don't/can't understand what you're communicating, (or in the case of Wikipedia - if it get's edited to shreds), then chances are, you didn't know what you were talking about...

Deleted!

And of course, because their articles were new and not notable, they were promptly put up for a deletion vote.

Re:

I don't think they're being assigned to articles about comic book characters.

Hmm...

Articles that actually contribute to common knowledge, and might be read more than once by someone besides the author, rather than the typical "show you know how to assemble ideas in a paper that I will then proceed to return to you so you can deposit it in the recycling bin? Thumbs up.

I've suggested this

Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.

Re:I've suggested this

Of course, another activity could be for students to take a snapshot of an article, and proceed with research (web or otherwise) to review and validate all the claims/statements. It would be a good exercise in citing sources and tuning their bullshit/propaganda detectors.

Re:

So long as the multiple references don't all hark back to one primary source. There is a myriad of regurgitated "research" floating around the 'net. You probably could find ten "primary sources" on any topic which are really reworked reports of the same

Damn...

My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it". I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.
I would suggest teaching students how to find legitimate sources instead of using the brute-force method of blocking everything they don't understand.

Re:Damn...

I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.

The thing about that is that there are students who actually do try to cite Wikipedia articles as references, I've seen it plenty of times. It usually results in the instructor having to crack down on the practice. I do think though that blocking Wikipedia entirely is overkill, it should just be understood that it does not count as an official source. Wikipedia is a good place to start researching a topic, and I usually end up using one of the external references on a page as a "legitimate source."

Re:Damn...

God, i wish we'd had wikipedia when i was in school. The references section is often a wonderful, up-to-date collection of very citeable resources.

The library was a wonderful place to get peer-reviewed articles that were 20, 30 years obsolete.

Oh noes! They can edit teh internets!11one

My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it".

As opposed to the rest of the internet which is chock-full of nothing but the highest quality, peer-reviewed content, written universally by the finest experts, hand selected from across the world?

I can only guess you're not reading this from a school computer, since anyone can post comments... and frankly anyone frequently does so.

Re:

As opposed to the rest of the internet which is chock-full of nothing but the highest quality, peer-reviewed content, written universally by the finest experts, hand selected from across the world?

Not everything on the internet is complete crap, it's jus

Re:

As opposed to books? Last I checked, anybody can write a book, and the only thing required to get it bound and distributed is money. Either a publishers, or your own. It doesn't say much for the school when they either don't understand how books are pub

recursive plagiarists

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of slackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. If university students are WRITING Wikipedia articles as PART of their assignments, where the hell will they cut and paste from in order to finish by the deadline? And what online resource, pray tell, will the professor go to now to determine if a student has been cutting and pasting? Its like a frickin' hall of mirrors!

not the first

I have given an assignment to work on a Wikipedia article, and I would be amazed if there weren't many more. Students thoroughly enjoyed the assignments.

What this instructor did was great. I'm not sure it is newsworthy.

Re:not the first

I'm not sure it is newsworthy.

No one was murdered, raped, bribed, extorted, or assaulted. I would claim TFA is far more newsworthy than most of what is claimed as news.

In this exercise the sum total of human achievement is increased rather than decreased. I find that highly newsworthy.

Re:not the first

Nicely put, but consider: the sum total of human achievement is increased in millions of ways every single day in ways which have never been reported on, because... it's not actually newsworthy. It's more like, completely expected.

A lack of human achievement would be newsworthy. Hmmm. Perhaps that's why politics gets so much coverage...

Half life of a WIkipedia Article?

It will be interesting to monitor these articles if the students don't maintain them once the course has finished. Do they maintain their improved quality over time, or do they eventually get eroded by an army of badly informed editors? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to measure the "half life" of knowledge within Wikipedia? In the absence of a concerted maintenance effort by a dedicated individual does the quality of a typical article increase of does it decay to noise? Sadly my experience with some articles which I was once passionate about, but am less so now, suggests the latter.

Re:Half life of a WIkipedia Article?

I've found this varies greatly.

I've seen 3 main pathways.

1. Pop culture trash: this doesn't refer to all articles regarding popular culture, but rather just a great many. It usually starts out as(or is quickly whipped into shape by an experienced editor as) a small blurb summarizing the cultural relevance and origins of some item. Over time rampant speculation, positive description, and dubious links filter into it. These get these way because the people who care about and watch the article are not people interested in the academic information involved, but rather people who just like to see more of it. I've fixed up articles like this only to have them return to idiocy in a matter of 3-4 months when I checked up later. Examples ALMOST any article fitting description: "list of characters from {video game/tv show}"
2. Seriously contentious items: These tend to be the best articles on wikipedia because every addition is scrutinized from 30 different perspectives, questionable items are well referenced because someone disagreeing will remove it otherwise, and things tend to be well scrutinized. Good examples: "evolution" and "god".
3. relatively obscure item of actual academic interest: article usually started by someone with a casual interest. Rare(sometimes as rarely as every few months), but consistent, non-vandalized additions adding a sentence or two about the subject and the occasional restructuring of the whole article in accordance with what had been added. Usually one or two guardian users who care deeply about the subject and watch the article for extreme alterations. These kinds of articles improve slowly and never reach the point of incredible quality.

That's just my observation and theorizing on the subject. I could see all sorts of reasons people would disagree with my assessment.

Yes, it's great but...

Personally, I too found writing for Wikipedia a very educational experience. The most important thing I learned was how to properly research and reference everything I wrote; I would make sure that I was never making any assumptions in what I wrote and that everything was as completely accurate, or at least true to my source material. If you start with a number of good books and scientific articles for reference material, you can produce really good articles. Never having studied in university, it's probably the closest I've ever come to doing scientific research. I found it to be a very satisfying experience and the lessons I learned will last me a lifetime.

The downside is when other people, who don't put nearly the same amount of effort into their research, come along and start adding information to the same article; almost always without any references. As opposed to simple vandalism that can easily be spotted by anyone, bad information degrades the overall quality of the article and is often difficult for other contributers to spot unless they are well versed in the subject matter. To maintain the quality of the articles you put so much work into, the only solution is to check on them constantly, often getting into protracted debates with determined individuals who really know very little. I find this quite depressing, but I see no immediate solutions. Citizendium, Veropedia? Maybe, but for now they're pretty obscure and it will be a long time before either have anywhere near the range of articles that Wikipedia does.

Hardly new

When I took Japanese History two years ago, we were given the assignment to pick a random topic related to Japanese history, research it, and write a Wikipedia article on the subject.
This worked well for Japanese History because the English language Wikipedia didn't have too many articles at the time, and even the articles it did have were fragmentary and for the most part abandoned. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to do with more "mainstream" articles. You'd get more feedback from other Wikipedia users, sure, but you'd also be providing far less of the content.

Link to original article

Here's the original Associated Press article [google.com] without the annoying Physorg ads. (Google finally cut out the middlemen and started hosting Associated Press content themselves.)

Articles created by the students

This is not the first assignment of its type. There have been more than 40 such projects [wikipedia.org]; there are at least 10 more in progress. The students and the professors need to be aware of the "No original research [wikipedia.org]" policy. Many university-level assignments involve original research, and Wikipedia is not the right place for publishing original research.

Here are some of the articles created as a part of the assignments we're talking about:

• Deforestation during the Roman period [wikipedia.org]
• Americanization (of Native Americans) [wikipedia.org]
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [wikipedia.org]
• Communal Wildlife Conservancies in Namibia [wikipedia.org]
• Akosombo Dam [wikipedia.org]
• Renewable energy in Africa [wikipedia.org]

imagine all papers written by every student ..

.. now that would be a lot research! Why do we just waste all that effort? Why not publish all papers on the web, even at the high school level?

We produce a work just to pass a course or test, and then we never use that report, or term paper again. Odd how we can recycle tin cans but waste the labors of mind.

Re:Makes perfect sense

I once asked some of my comp sci lecturers why they didn't get students to do something useful, like work on open source, instead of assigning them pointless busy work projects. Two main answers:

1. it's too hard to grade
2. it's seen by many to be exploitative.

So there ya go.

Re:Makes perfect sense

An example in German would be doing a group assignment on Schiller [wikipedia.org], then have the group add to the article after the paper had been graded. There's lots of articles that are in need of extra info, and since the schools have books on various subjects as a given, they might as well use it in their education. I do follow that it might be more labor intensive, especially to begin with while the teacher has to learn how to work this into the curriculum and grading.

Re:

That brings up an interesting problem, though. Less motivated students are prone to ripping off large sections of text books. So would putting their work up on wikipedia end up being more damaging than helpful? (Of course, that assumes that WP is mostly fr

Re:

Actually, I like that idea of adding back to the article. Several of my teachers throughout school believed that the real proof that you've learned it is being able to do more than just rote memorization, such as write it or tell it in various ways, from

Re:Makes perfect sense

My wife, a research librarian, attended a conference last week where Professor Groom presented on this topic. What she found interesting were a couple of points:

• The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.

• The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.

• Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.

• She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.

• She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.

• She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.

• Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.

• Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.

• Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.

• Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?

So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia today :)

Re:enhanced quality != correct

>I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.

To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.

>I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to
>prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them.
Off topic. Read the article, or at least the summary. The students are from the University of Washington (a very good school btw). They are not high school students.

>I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think
>logically is now common place.
Why do you think that is?

In the US we have extremely poor k through 12 education, and then some very excellent colleges (in most other countries it is the reverse.) US high schools are paid for by *local* property taxes, so kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods get an excellent education, and most kids who grow up in middle or lower class neighborhoods get no education whatsoever until college. Many of my generation skip high school altogether and go directly into community college. The school districts provide for this in tacit acknowledgment of how worthless public high schools are.

Students are essentially expected to make up for 12 years of non education in 4 years of college. Most high schools, including the one I went to, are just jails to keep kids off the street until they turn 18.

BTW. Some, such as myself, come out of that and go on to do well in college and get a good job, only to end up paying social security to provide for the retirement of a generation which wasn't interested in providing for my generation's education. This seems fairly nonsensical to us, and so we are disinclined to continue this practice of "social security". What goes around comes around.

>Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that
>English is /not/ the students first language. But, the problem is that it IS the students
>first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years),
>the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."

Languages evolve over time, and the previous generation always have the sense that the next generation is somehow speaking the language wrong. Your parents probably thought that there was something wrong in the way you talked as well. If you went to shakespeare's time, I'm sure people would think that you were some kind of idiot who couldn't speak properly.

The thing is, that english is *improving* not getting worse. Languages change in response to changing concepts, and the addition of new terminology. Modern english has extremely precise technical terminology embedded in it. Many things that were considered passive are now considered active, and so now are expressed as verbs instead of nouns. Many grammatical constructions have changed to allow for expressions that have become more common to be expressed more clearly and unambiguously. Many sophisticated systems for expressing common phrases in shorthand have developed so that ideas can be expressed more concisely.

You have to remember that no one ever *designed* the English language and that there *is no* authoritative English grammer or vocabulary because the English grammar and vocabularies are an *open set*.

The ability to construct language is genetically ingrained in all human beings, and if vocabulary or grammatical productions are ever missing or inadequate, we have the capacity to create them at will. If you leave some kids alone on an island and let them fend for themselves without teaching them any known human language, it has been demonstrated that they will generate their own complete la

Re:Another milepost on the way to irrelevance

At the risk of pointing you to the work of a five year old, perhaps you should check out this Wikipedia article on the slippery slope [wikipedia.org] and why it can be a fallacy. Its use in conjunction with a straw man argument seems particularly relevant to your post.