For over a year now, I've been doing something similar in film-studies classes I teach and I'd say the results have been far less than 'transformative', as TFA reports. In fact, I'd say it's been more failure than success and I discontinued a good part of it this year.
Here's what I did last academic year, in two junior/senior-level seminars:
- All students were required to contribute to a wiki I run -- collaboratively producing lecture and discussion notes.
- Students were also offered extra credit to edit film articles on Wikipedia.
The results of this wiki experiment were mixed. Less than half of the students did the required assignment -- even though their grades were lowered for lack of participation and constructing lecture/discussion notes would have been a huge advantage to them on the exams.
And, as far as the extra-credit option goes, out of about 40 students, only 3 chose to do it. The ones that did sent me their Wikipedia ID and a link to the articles they edited. By checking the articles' history pages I could easily see how much work they did and how good it was.
I wish I had a better sense of why my wiki experiment failed. Is wiki editing (which works like word processing did in, oh, 1985) too hard and unfamiliar? Are students unwilling to share their lecture/discussion notes with others? Should the assignments have been structured differently? Were these particular students luddites who did not understand the technology of wikis? Did I not give them enough instruction on how wikis work?
I really don't know the answer, but my experience last year was negative enough that this year I eliminated the required wiki work, although I am still offering extra credit for editing Wikipedia articles. We'll see how it goes.