Transcript for Nywikiconf wales keynote 25july2009 from 0:35:54 to 0:37:03
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On the other hand, I think Andrew Lih, when he was teaching in Hong Kong, had students go out and create articles about things in Hong Kong. He also is a very experienced Wikipedian himself and he prepared them and taught them, and it was a great opportunity to both improve Wikipedia but also to really give these students a much better understanding of how Wikipedia works and things like that. I just think it just depends on how it's done.
In general, having somebody get up in front of a lecture hall with 400 students and say "your assignment for tomorrow is edit Wikipedia," yeaah, maybe that's not so helpful. It might be better if what they did is set up a wiki on a university server and say "actually, we're going to generate our own mini-Wikipedia about 'topic X', go to Wikipedia, learn the conventions, the styles, we're going to try to write in a Wikipedia style but we're going to do it on our own wiki, then at the end of the class when we're done, we'll think about letting the Wikipedians know, if they want to take the stuff it's under a compatible license." That would be a really neat kind of exercise, I think. There's better and worse ways of doing it, but it's tricky sometimes.
