On 30/10/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 30/10/2007, Steve Bennett
<stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> The idea is noble, but without a bit of thought
about how the paper is going
> to fit in with Wikipedia, it's a bit like donating an elephant to a charity.
A white elephant, indeed. Except that it's
counterproductive for the
donor, as well...
In general, I'd go so far as to say that our first reaction to someone
suggesting something like this should be to *discourage* it - it isn't
that we don't like the idea of more contributions, but the fact that
we have our own routine and our own direction means that the
contributions tend not to get dealt with in a very helpful manner as
far as the institution's concerned. They may be deleted out of hand,
they may be swiftly rewritten, moved to a different name, reverted...
any number of things that make it hard to determine if your students
actually did the work.
Mmm. I do like the fact that significant numbers of the contributions
actually stuck. And that the students got to deal with interacting
with real people in the real world on a real project.
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
before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just
waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an
article. Someone with university-level research facilities should be
able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much
more time.
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.
Another approach: see all those lists of missing encyclopedic
articles? Same thing: research and summary.
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.
- d.