Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles 276
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, wait. This is slashdot. No one here has any idea what I'm talking about. Nevermind.
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:5, Insightful)
1. it's too hard to grade
2. it's seen by many to be exploitative.
So there ya go.
I've suggested this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, the irony.
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Deleted! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Doublt benefit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not the first (Score:5, Insightful)
In this exercise the sum total of human achievement is increased rather than decreased. I find that highly newsworthy.
Re:Oh noes! They can edit teh internets!11one (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, not everything on the internet is crap, but the school is not blocking everything. I'd guess they don't block plenty of sites which are mich much worse than wikipedia. Seeing as the average quality of wikipedia is really very high (for the kinds of things I look up, at any rate) then `worse than wikipedia' is most of the internet.
Re:enhanced quality != correct (Score:5, Insightful)
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
>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 language from the ground up in precisely 2 generations. This has been demonstrated many times. There is no real need for English language education for native speakers.
Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's great but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Multiple References (Score:3, Insightful)
Take any topic, and do some real seaching on the web, and you'll soon get a deja-vu sense while reading though the "research papers".
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Things that otherwise wouldn't get fixed, get fixed when someone is bored.
You missed the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You missed the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:4, Insightful)
- 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.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You act like this one, perhaps slightly low quality article, is going to break Wikipedia. This is how articles start. Sometimes people who don't know much about the subject write the structure to better entice an expert to stay and fix it up. Eventually other people will read it, and get this, they can edit the page too. It doesn't have to be perfect at the start, it's an iterative process. Collaborative too, people who take that student's work and expand upon it.
Maybe you should check out this Wikipedia thing. It's not quite as fragile as you think, it's already got a few articles.
Re:Doublt benefit.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2, Insightful)
That comment doesn't deserve to be modded down. However, I'd be interested in why we should care about Daniel Brandt, and specifically, why we should care enough to attribute an "anonymous coward" to the guy and then down-moderate his comments?
Of the two of you, I'd say you're coming off as the more unhinged.