[Foundation-l] Fwd: wikiEducation: The Classroom Wikipedia

Sat Jul 2 22:44:32 UTC 2011

Hi,

On 2 July 2011 23:28, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> On 2 July 2011 23:16, Isabell Long <isabell121 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Sorry to dampen things, but as we're proposing "what if"s, what if some
>> of Wikipedia's material was copied to it and it just became a kind of
>> duplicate of Wikipedia run, as proposed, by the WMF?  There would be
>> admins etc, but
>> run by students for students: that's not always a good thing.  With
>> regard to what you said about maybe only articles absent in Wikipedia
>> would be
>> assigned, that's a good idea (it avoids the direct "what if" mentioned
>> above),
>> but an assignment you can't straight to a Wikipedia article for
>> information but actually have to go browsing the web for?  That would
>> horrify many students I know.  ;-)

Let's try part of the second-to-last sentence again: "... an
assignment on a subject you can't go straight to a Wikipedia article
for information on...".

> 3rd grade, or post-graduate?

That's another question I meant to ask: what are we defining "students" as here?

> Well, the existence of a Wikipedia article
> on almost any subject is always going to be there, no matter what kind of
> writing exercise students participate in. Great assignments will be about
> subjects our regular editors don't have much interest in but students do,
> ephemeral, topical subjects.

Ah, right.  Like the example you used earlier: an article on Lady Gaga. :-)

> Copying from or using Wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia, as a source
> would diminish rather than increase evaluation of work; that is pretty
> much standard practice anyway.

That's very true.  This question delves a bit into the specifics and
"rules" of running such a project, but would that then get put onto
the Wiki (going back to my "what if" in my previous email...), would
the student be asked to re-do it, or would all of this be at the
discretion of the supervising teacher?  I assume the latter, but we
don't have to delve into the specifics at this time of night.  :-)

Isabell.