Wikipedia:School and university projects

From Free net encyclopedia

{{{1{{{1|}}}|

Shortcut:
{{{1|}}}
}}}
For an overview of Wikipedia in relation to schools, see Wikipedia:Schools FAQ

Contents

[edit]

Overview

If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university, we encourage you to use Wikipedia in your class as an example of an open content website that works (or doesn't). You are not the first person to do so, and many of these projects have resulted in both advancing the student's knowledge and useful content being added to Wikipedia. An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educative but also makes it more interesting ("the world gets to see my work"), probably resulting in increased dedication. Besides, it will give the students a chance to collaborate on course notes and papers, and their effort will remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper course-work.

Please read Wikipedia:school and university projects - instructions for teachers and lecturers. You may also find Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students useful as a resource for your students.

Please do keep the following guidelines in mind:

  1. Practice first yourself before setting an assignment. Log into Wikipedia yourself, and spend some time editing. Do this long enough to get some reaction to your work, preferably long enough to also include negative (and, if you are lucky, unreasonable) feedback which will help you understand some of the more problematic aspects of Wikipedia. If you are not happy about associating this with your academic name, you can easily create a pseudonym- but please create an account for yourself.
  2. Introductions. When you want to start such a project, please briefly describe what you are doing on this page under the "Current projects" heading, and if you think it is distinctive enough, feel free to leave a note on the Wikipedia:Village pump. Leave some contact information in the event that you need to be contacted about your project.
  3. Keep it real. Please do not encourage your students to create nonsense pages or add junk to articles. Though usually cleaned up very quickly, it still has to be done manually by humans who would prefer to engage in more productive work on encyclopedia articles. Furthermore, your students might be blocked from editing Wikipedia for "vandalism." In egregious cases, this will result in your entire school being blocked. If you want your students to 'learn wiki' first, please ask them to read Wikipedia:Help and direct them to Wikipedia:Sandbox for any test or practice edits they wish to make.
  4. Testing and avoiding. It may be a good idea to run your own local version of Wikipedia and use it for experiments first. Use the Wikimedia software which can be easily installed on Linux. If some students do not want to submit material to Wikipedia (which forces their content to be licensed under the Free content license, the GFDL), they can use this for their final exercise instead.
  5. Account names. Please do not create numerical accounts that match your university or school account numbers. While this may be initially convenient, if your students continue to edit Wikipedia, they may well to do so under a real name or a more congenial pseudonym. It also becomes confusing for others Wikipedians to review a number of edits made under very similar account names.
  6. Read The Fine Manual. Encourage your students to take a look at the pages linked from Wikipedia:Help — they should answer many immediate questions.
  7. Copyrights. Please do keep Wikipedia:Copyrights in mind. Not everything on the Web is free for the taking, and even that which is may not be compatible with our licensing. This is true for both text and images. Please remember your students will probably work from your own course notes. Be sure that this is acceptable. Furthermore, check who owns your students' course work. If the owner is your institution, check that you have permission to contribute it. If it is your students, ensure that you have their legitimate, probably written, consent to require them to add material to Wikipedia.
  8. Summarize and analyze. Once you have finished a project, we would very much appreciate reading a description of the results. This could be on a separate page if it is long, or on this page in the "Past projects" heading.
  9. No original research. Wikipedia is not the place to publish new ideas, discoveries or articles. We are an encyclopedia, not an academic journal. You should familiarize yourself with our relevant policy: Wikipedia:No original research
[edit]

Considerations and suggestions

Wikipedia policy is a combination of written guidelines with unwritten customs, and can be difficult for a newcomer to fathom. Most Wikipedians will be helpful in guiding newcomers and explaining how we do things. However, for the sake of your class we strongly suggest that you yourself contribute here and become familiar with Wikipedia before sending your students. Your students will be much less likely to encounter problems here if you can give them appropriate guidance.

It is especially important to consider what your students will contribute here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and has certain somewhat nebulous standards for its topics. A look at what wikipedia is not and what's in, what's out is helpful in finding our topic boundaries.

As Wikipedia expands, students may have trouble finding appropriate subjects for which no article exists. Unless you have specific topics in mind that you know are appropriate, try the following, rather than requiring them to create new ones on their own.

[edit]

Suggested exercises

[Please add more.]

[edit]

Current projects

[edit]

Dartmouth et al

A group of Dartmouth undergraduates were recently encouraged to contribute new articles to Wikipedia. Some of the contributions were perfect; others were quickly listed on VfD. More details can be found on WP:VfD, WikiEN-l, and the teacher's userpage.

[edit]

Indiana University

In two sections of CMCL C121, "Public Speaking", groups of 4-5 students will be given an article from Wikipedia which matches their team presentation topic. They will be asked to verify the information in the Wikipedia article using non-internet sources (that is sources which are not exclusively on the internet). They will then submit which bits they have been able to verify, not verify, or refute. The instructor is considering giving the students extra-credit for adding their references and/or correcting mistakes on wikipedia. If this is done, an introduction page will be created for the students explaining what they can do. In addition, I will list the relevant pages here for observation. --best, kevin ···Kzollman | Talk··· 02:57, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit]

University of California, Irvine

Jeffrey Barrett, Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, will allow students to write/rewrite two wikipedia articles in the areas of Philosophy of Science or Epistemology instead of writing a seminar paper in his graduate level "Epistemology of Science" class offered in the Winter term of 2006. I am auditing this class, and have offered to be a liason for any students working on this project. At least two students have suggested interest. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 00:09, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit]

St. Cloud State University

Matt Barton, an assistant professor of English at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, has decided to start a Rhetoric Portal in his rhetorical theory class. [7]

He previously assigned and coordinated the creation of the Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook. Liblamb 18:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit]

University of Hong Kong

For this Spring 2006 assignment, U21/HKU Human Security students (undergraduates) have been placed in teams to contribute substantive information on Human Security to Wikipedia. The objective of this assignment (which comprises 25% of the final grade) is to create a comprehensive and balanced Human Security Wikipedia article. The instructor (LMCinHK) started a Wikipedia article entitled Human security then placed students in teams with specific parameters for how to expand that article. Each team is responsible for a different facet of human security on which to elaborate and students are evaluated not only on their written contributions, but also on the effectiveness of their editing. The idea is for students to learn from the advice of their own teammates, but to also benefit from the editorial feedback of fellow Wikipedia contributors. The course will end in mid May 2006.

Background information about the course and specific instructions given to students are reproduced on my user page <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LMCinHK> (although I have withheld the student names in order to protect their privacy.) My thanks to Piotr Konieczny / Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus and Kevin Zollman / kzollman who both kindly agreed to allow me to adopt some of their student instructions from their respective university project web pages located at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/Pitt-Societies-2005> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/Indiana_CMCL>. --LMCinHK 07:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit]

Planned projects


[edit]

Penn State University

General--purpose wiki(s) for student--based class descriptions, student organizations, peer advising, and a number of other topics beneficial to the university. Gchriss 20:20, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Detailed at [8]

[edit]

University of Pittsburgh / Societies

Template:Details I designed a framework for an introductory course to sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, in which students are to be given an option tp write several encyclopedic articles at Wikipedia instead or in addition to 'classis' assignments. There would probably be around 40 groups of 5 students each. Each student would have a separate wiki account, and each group would be assigned a sociology-stub and asked to expand it to the level as close to Featured Article as they can. I, User:Piotrus, was to take care of introducing students to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines. At the moment I am still looking for a faculty member willing to go forward with this project. The framework developed so far can be easily adapted to non-sociology courses. The main page of this project is at the moment at here - you can copy and easily adapt it to any other course. The project begun (as a page on Wiki) in September 2005. At that moment it has led to no editing other then that on the project pages. Please direct any comments to my user talk page or to the project talk page, and feel free to copy anything from my framework for your courses.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:10, 29 August 2005 (UTC)updated 22 Jan 2006

[edit]

Past projects

[edit]

Oregon State University

[edit]

University of Hong Kong (2005)

In what has become a project nearly every semester, Andrew Lih's (User:Fuzheado) class in new media is covering WTO topics, and has been editing the following articles:

Project will be concluded on November 30, 2005.

[edit]

Georgia Institute of Technology

Three classes of English 1101 spent a good portion of the semester drafting an entry on print culture for Wikipedia. Throughout the semester we've read a variety of texts on print culture and worked in small groups to draft versions of the article. We have posted an article and will be editing it. We will also be observing and discussing in class the edits other users make. You can see our drafting efforts at our test site using MediaWiki. We also used pbwiki to draft some of the article. Project will end sometime around 12/09/05.

[edit]

Northern Alberta Institute of Technology

As part of BAI530, a Leadership course in the Bachelor of Applied Information Systems Technology program, students are required to participate in group community service projects of at least 10 hours of work. This semester (Fall 2005), five students opted to use those 10 hours contributing to Wikipedia. Some of the articles they contributed to include:

[edit]

University of Virginia

December 2005. Students in one section of an undergraduate (fourth-year) engineering thesis course have been asked to contribute a Wikipedia article (or expand an existing stub) on the expertise acquired in their major assignment this semester: writing an engineering research proposal. The proposal includes a literature review and rationale section, from which they can draw material suitable for a Wikipedia article.

They have been asked to read the available Help resources on creating good Wikipedia articles. Each has submitted a letter to me (the instructor) stating that they understand that they are licensing their work under the GFDL (those who did not wish to do so can submit the article to me instead of posting it). Comments welcome (use my user talk page). Bryan 21:24, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

The following articles have been posted (so far):

Here is a link to the assignment. Bryan 22:38, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit]

University of Vienna

See /Vienna 2002-2003 and /Vienna 2005-2006.

[edit]

Portland State University

Spring 2003: Bart Massey taught another offering of his ongoing combinatorial search class. His difficulty in finding an acceptable course textbook after a number of years of trying led to the idea of having students create content on Wikipedia that reflected the course materials, for future use.

The experiment was a mixed success. Some useful Wiki pages were created (e.g. combinatorial search, constraint-satisfaction problem). Some other pages were edited to reflect new content (e.g. best-first search). While Bart was not aware of this page or its guidelines at the time, he believes that they were mostly followed. In particular, he tried to edit all the inserted material for content and style (although failing somewhat at the latter).

Ultimately, much of the material collected was created offline on the course Wiki and elsewhere, and has never been incorporated into Wikipedia. This is a shame: if some other Wikipedian wanted to assist with this, that would be great. Otherwise, Bart will get around to it sometime before the next course offering: the project is currently moribund.

(For what it is worth, Bart agrees with the comments of Fuzheado above: Wikipedians, please do not be shy about helping clean up these pages. They could still use editing and addition.)

External Link: Bart's PSU CS 443/543 Combinatorial Search course page.

[edit]

University of Hong Kong (2003)

14 July 2003: User:Fuzheado "teaches at the University of Hong Kong and is using Wikipedia to help teach his normally very structured students a lesson about the chaos and joy of collaborative editing." Several numerical accounts have been created for the students. The class at the Journalism and Media Studies Center is called You've Got Mail: Interactive Media, News and Communication

Designed for advanced undergraduates, the course examines the interactive technologies that are increasingly influencing the way people communicate, share news and create relationships. The course will look at how and why people are using interactive games, Kazaa’s peer-to-peer technology, web cameras, chat rooms, talking avatars, wireless and other technologies. It will also challenge students to assess the usefulness of new technologies and forecast how they will impact society and different cultures.

Students have been broken into groups of roughly seven people each, and asked to contribute to a specific topic related to Hong Kong or Chinese culture. The topics include: Lamma Island, Dim sum, Mongkok, Chinese tea culture, Chinese white dolphin, MTR, Beaches of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Tramways, Victoria Peak, Ecology of Hong Kong, Education of Hong Kong, Newspapers of Hong Kong, Apple Daily.

There may be a tendency for Wikipedians to keep their "hands-off" these sections as they're being produced by students. Please don't! Preserve the dynamic of Wikipedia - keep your hands in it, and treat them as any other Wikipedians. Part of the experience is to work with strangers to collaboratively edit, each person pitching in what experience they have -- grammar, editing, rewording, links, context, statistics, etc.

UPDATE: CNN International Tech Watch aired a segment this morning on the Wikipedia and our student project. See CNN TechWatch videos for a streaming video of the segment. -- Fuzheado 05:35, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

  • Spring 2004, FOSS0001: Media in Contemporary China, will be using Wikipedia to create articles on some media organizations in China, such as: China Youth Daily (newspaper), Caijing (magazine), News Probe aka Xinwen Diaocha (a news programme of China Central Television), Sina.com (web)
[edit]

ELP 127

User:Kaisersanders has been teaching English to foreign business students, these being:

User:Kaisersanders/contrib

and appears to have finished around 30 July 2004.

[edit]

Columbia University School of the Arts (New York City)

Open Source Culture: Intellectual Property, Technology, and the Arts is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered in fall 2004 at the Columbia University School of the Arts. For more information on this project, see Wikipedia:School and university projects/Open Source Culture.

Update. The course appears to have ended in the 2004. There are no edits since December 2004.
[edit]

Bad Mergentheim Business School

International Management Class: We studied Customer Experience Management (CEM), a new marketing concept in our class and as an outcome of this, all 19 students shared their insights into CEM at Wikipedia, so others can quickly get into CEM as well. We hope that our texts are easy to understand and do welcome any changes or further contributions.

The results can be found at: Customer Experience Management (CEM)

As one contributor to another, (and without anywhere else to write this) can I encourage the students in this project to create a login, so that there is somewhere than we can provide helpful feedback and advice on this project. DJ Clayworth 16:30, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Update. The course appears to have ended in the 2004. There are very few 2005 edits so far.
[edit]

Norwegian School of Management (Norway)

I am tasking the students to create an account for themselves, edit some pages (in the English or Norwegian version of Wikipedia,) and reflect on their experience. The English assignment page is at User:Espen/gra6821 (there is also one in the Norwegian version. The list of participating students (created by the students themselves) is at User:Espen/gra6821/stud6821 (as well as in the Norwegian version.) The students are Master level business school students, the course title is Technology Strategy and Strategic Technology, and the topic for the lecture and assignment is collaborative software. I will underscore the importance of Wikipedia culture, NPOV, and so on, and use the experience to drive a discussion about what makes collaborative software work (or not.) Espen 11:48, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Update. The course appears to have ended in the first half of 2005. There is little activity on the related articles.
[edit]

University Saarland (Germany)

Institute for Information Science

Materials that were generated during the German course Knowledge Representation and Information Retrieval WS2003/2004 were integrated in de.wikipedia by the lecturer and (hopefully) the students. Details about the articles can be found on the course-page and on [9].

[edit]

University of Washington (Seattle)

Course Webpage

The undergraduate class Society and the Oceans (SMA/ENVIR/SIS 103) includes a project to make a Wikipedia contribution on the Puget Sound, Puget Sound environmental issues, South Maury Island environmental issues, the live food fish trade or the aquarium fish trade.

Update. The course appears to have ended in the first half of 2005. There is little activity on the related articles.
[edit]

Teletraffic engineering

See Wikipedia:Deletion_policy/Teletraffic_Engineering for discussion.

  • specifically, there are some issues about the quality and verifiability of the work submitted. The project appears to have been started around early 2005 and has ended by now, but some users are still cleaning up related articles as of summer 2005.
[edit]

University of Georgia / Memento

An English class at the University of Georgia rewrote and added a lot of material to Memento (film). The article was expanded, but many of the class's contributions were original research and needed to be cleaned up. See Talk:Memento (film). Rhobite 21:57, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit]

Other projects

[edit]

See also

ru:Википедия:Проект:Школы и университеты

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects"