Journalism Students Assigned To Write On Wikipedia 138
Hugh Pickens writes "eCampus News reports that at the University of Denver, journalism students are assigned to write Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation, and students have so far composed 24 Wikipedia articles this year, covering topics from the gold standard to the San Juan Mountains to bimetallism, an antiquated monetary standard. Journalism instructors Lynn Schofield Clark and Christof Demont-Heinrich say students are told to check their sourcing carefully, just as they would for an assignment at a local newspaper. 'Students are leery about mentioning Wikipedia, because they might be subjected to criticism. But I tell them it's an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss all of [its content],' says Demont-Heinrich, who first assigned the Wikipedia writing to students in his introductory course taught during the university's recent winter semester. He said the Wikipedia entries didn't require old-school shoe leather reporting — because the online encyclopedia bars the use of original quotes — but they teach students how to thoroughly research a topic before publishing to a site that has over 350 million unique visitors and gets over 10 billion page views a month. 'I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,' says Demont-Heinrich. 'If you're not trained to expect that and write for that, then you're not going to be ready for the work world.'"
Heading it of at the pass (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Non-Notable (Score:5, Insightful)
I consider this a very, very bad idea.
Really? I consider it a very very wonderful idea. If an article is deleted, big deal. The student will most likely retain their own copy when they submit it to the professor.
Let's take my report on Carl Sagan in high school and my lengthy paper on the pros and cons of the EU's end of the year reallocation between countries in my Macroeconomics course. The former is probably better documented on Wikipedia already but might have served as a decent seed article. The latter I cannot find anything on and am not even sure if it still goes on. Regardless, you have no option of reading any form of my two works. Any information or references I had accumulated are lost to the ages. Just like if the articles had been deemed non-notable.
I like the idea of being able to produce something useful out of what seems like an inane exercise and to allow students the pleasure of disseminating knowledge responsibly.
I maintain it's a great idea with no bad consequences when you compare it to the old way. The only bad thing would be if you made a very embarrassing error and it was stored in wikipedia's history for eternity. Oh well, better learn early about the foreverity of the internet. Just like my Slashdot comments.
Re:Non-Notable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Non-Notable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Non-Notable (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they can work with Wikipedia, by asking for a list of article stubs or proposed articles Wiki would like to see researched and written. It could be something that benefits both parties.
Excellent. Then the students will know what to write, and the Wikipedia admins will know what to expect so they can delete it. Everyone wins!
Refreshig (Score:1, Insightful)
How refreshing it is to see someone in academia who truly cares about preparing their students for the real world...
If more of our teachers and professors actually had real world experience, we might not have a workforce that is falling behind.
EXCELLENT idea - student hours are not wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than have students waste time producing busywork that the professor will Trashfile at the end of the year, they are contributing their efforts toward society. These Wiki articles will be picked-up by other editors and added to with new information, and someone like me will come along and read them years later.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Post a Comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Non-Notable (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you worry too much.
Wikipedia has tons of non-notable articles, like an article about the VHS v. Betamax War (they're both dead - who cares?), a list of Kim Possible episodes, characters from the Star Trek universe (one article per character), and so on. I see no harm in adding articles about the gold standard, San Juan Mountains, and bimettalism.
Great, competent contributors (Score:4, Insightful)
Just what I wanted. An undergraduate student writing an Encyclopedia article on monetary standards...
Re:Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
But of course, that's the same for a newspaper article. I'd posit that as an information source, newspapers contain at least as much "questionable content" as Wikipedia. The only difference is that few people think newspapers are questionable unless they (1) disagree with what it's saying, or (2) are an expert in the subject area.
Re:Non-Notable (Score:3, Insightful)
If an article is deleted, big deal. The student will most likely retain their own copy when they submit it to the professor.
Personally, I would think this could affect your grade. As a journalism student, a valuable skill to have is picking the notable stories from those that are non-notable. Your future employer will want you to write about stuff people care about (particularly your publication's target audience), so you better be able to accurately judge that for yourself.
I like the idea of being able to produce something useful out of what seems like an inane exercise and to allow students the pleasure of disseminating knowledge responsibly.
Agreed, if you're going to go through that much effort to colelct the information you might as well publish it somewhere it could be read.
Re:Lrn2Palindrome (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: your comment, GP's user ID *IS* a palindrome. It helps if you know what a word means before you correct someone else's use of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome [wikipedia.org]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/palindrome [reference.com]
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palindrome [merriam-webster.com]
http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/ [typepad.com]
Oops, well 3 out of 4 anyway ;)
Re:EXCELLENT idea - student hours are not wasted (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Non-Notable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EXCELLENT idea - student hours are not wasted (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, misterdiscreet is a dick. He should find something better to do than delete other peoples articles.
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares whether *they* are credible? What matters is if their *sources* are credible -and that is in plain sight.
Re:Non-Notable (Score:3, Insightful)
As a journalism student, a valuable skill to have is picking the notable stories
I was going to say, yes, but here it's just a small committee at one business deciding what's notable, instead of the public, but then I realized, that's probably how it's done at a newspaper too.
Kudos to Clark and Demont-Heinrich (Score:5, Insightful)
They "get it." Wikipedia is unique, but it is based on elements of traditional scholarship--citing sources--and journalism--the "neutral point of view."
As for the snarky comments on notability, they are misplaced. The bar for notability is very low and easy to surmount, and the community culture tends to support inclusion if there is even a shred of supporting evidence to justify it. It is mostly a problem for those who object _in principle_ to bothering to provide evidence, to self-promoters who believe they should be free to use Wikipedia to publicize themselves and thus _attain_ notability, to people who regard themselves as experts and believe that they are entitled to contribute material without supporting evidence on their own authority. There is also principled opposition by people who have a different vision of what Wikipedia should be than the prevailing view.
I have rescued a number of articles from deletion simply by citing sources. One example: an article, when originally created, read in its entirety as follows: "[name], AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net." As such, it was ripe for deletion. What did I do? I found the source, the Library Journal article that called her a "mover and shaker" and demonstrated that Library Journal found her notable. I found that she'd been mentioned in The New York Times, as one of the "credentialed bloggers" given press credentials to attend a political convention, the first time that had been done. I found a Wired article about her opposition to the Patriot Act's library provisions. By adding these to the article, I showed that she had _some_ notability and allowed editors to gauge _what that degree of notability was_. That turned out to be sufficient to prevent deletion.
The librarian was no more and no less notable than she was when the original article was inserted and nominated for deletion. All that changed was that I was willing to put in a little work, and show what amount of notability she had--more than me, less than Meryl Streep; what she was notable for (not just starting a blog); and who, exactly, had taken note of her.
It is not hard to get a new article into Wikipedia. In an incident that demonstrated Wikipedia at its worst, some Dartmouth students who didn't follow their class assignments well contributed breezy articles in promotional language about their fraternities and their a cappella groups. They encountered a storm of criticism that unfortunately turned snarky, unkind, and dismissive as irritable editors saw Dartmouth article after Dartmouth article. Meanwhile, it almost passed unnoticed that other students had contributed valuable articles, such as one about an unfinished Jane Austen novel [wikipedia.org]. This was, of course, accepted, and nobody ever suggested that there was a notability problem, even though I never heard of it and I imagine you never did, either.
Re:It must be disappointing (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep.
That it's a waste of time to contribute because your hard work is so easily erased by people pushing an agenda. I can understand people not liking HD Radio and adding criticisms to the article (it does in fact interfere with AM Radio during night hours).
What I can not understand is people erasing useful information, like the stream's datarate (300 kbit/s), or how many channels can be carried per station (7), or its capabilities (text, stereo, and surround sound). Why erase that useful info? It makes me wonder why I even bothered.
Re:Non-Notable (Score:2, Insightful)
Being an encyclopedia, and thus a tertiary source, Wikipedia is mostly looking for articles for which numerous secondary sources can be assembled. (An AP article is one example of a secondary source.) Note that an encyclopedia does not reproduce the content from the secondary sources, and it certainly doesn't compete with or "scoop" them. It summarizes them, and (apart from maybe a handful of footnotes) it generally treats them collectively. For Wikipedia, the single most important notability criterion is the availability of secondary source material on the topic. Online, by preference, although print sources can also be used.
Typically a journalist is not interested in whether there are notable secondary sources or not. He's looking for anything that readers will be interested in reading about, and bonus points if it's current. *Extra* bonus points if your story breaks first and all the other papers have to scramble to catch up. Journalists will use secondary sources when it's all they can get, but they prefer primary sources.
In some ways Wikinews would be a better fit for journalists than Wikipedia, but college students aren't necessarily in a position to report directly on the topics Wikinews wants to cover, because they need to stay near enough to campus that they can get to class on a regular basis. So unless some major news story is unfolding right next to the university... Also, Wikinews isn't nearly as well-known as Wikipedia, so the assignment wouldn't have the same appeal.
Note too that I'm not saying it can't be a useful assignment. Actually, the topics mentioned in the summary are definitely a good fit for Wikipedia's notability criteria, so maybe the professor is sensitive to the differences and making an effort to hand out the assignments in a reasonable way. Writing exercises are often designed to stress certain skills that the students need to develop, without regard for other skills that they will practice another time. Not being in the class, I don't know how well this assignment fits in to the curriculum or how useful it is for the students. It *could* be useful, if done well.
But it's not exactly the kind of writing most journalists will do after graduation.
I mean, sure, it's closer than if he had them writing zombie novellas or picture books...