[Foundation-l] Term papers on Wikipedia

Tue Oct 30 16:22:38 UTC 2007

On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> From what I've seen surveying the various classroom projects people
> have tried, the most successful are ones where some effort is made to
> screen topics for encyclopedicity and gaps in Wikipedia's coverage,
> and/or the assignments are focused on interacting with the Wikipedia
> community (i.e., content is posted early and students follow the fate
> of their work over the semester).

Yes. Rather than just telling the students "go write something", send
them to a wikiproject's list of redlinks, or to the missing articles
project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles

With university research facilities onhand, writing some decent
articles with good references shouldn't be much work at all. We'll get
more good content and they'll get a good introductory experience to
Wikipedia.

- d.