On 10/30/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I can see something like this working if the area is carefully
selected. There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here
There's plenty for uni students. Biology and history have massive
numbers of articles to be written.
And hey, yesterday, I stumbled across [[Tommy Langan]], apparently one of
the 15 best Gaelic footballers ever, who has one line on him. Maybe there's
not much truly generalist low hanging fruit
that could be attacked by a primary school student, but delve even slightly
into a specialist area,
and there is tons.
Possible approach: find a WikiProject that you know
the research
material will be there for. Set the students to work filling out those
requested article links.
That's a much better idea than letting students pick their own topics.
Another approach: see all those lists of missing encyclopedic
articles? Same thing: research and summary.
That's what I do.
This would add lots of good and useful encyclopedic content without
running much risk of getting up Wikipedians' noses
or horrifying the
students or their professor.
The only challenge is finding topics that would be suitable for students
to write
about...that would actually demonstrate research skills, knowledge
of the subject etc. I guess they could submit proposals and the teacher
could decide if they liked the topic.
I don't think any of the subjects I did at uni would have been very
conducive to this. Maybe a first year essay "The history of English
orthography", but after that it was always very particular analysis,
argumentation etc.
Steve