Wikipedia:School and university projects

This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Wikipedia:School and university projects is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:

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WP:SUP
For an overview of Wikipedia in relation to schools, see Wikipedia:Schools FAQ.

If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university or college, we encourage you to use Wikipedia and/or Wikiversity in your class to demonstrate how an open content website works (or doesn't). 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 educational 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 might remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper coursework, or classroom systems which are routinely reinitialized.

WikiProject Classroom coordination exists to provide guidance to educators who incorporate Wikipedia writing assignments into their classes. Post questions for experienced Wikipedia volunteers at the talk page. Instructions for teachers and lecturers and instructions for students are useful resources. There is also a syllabus boilerplate that you may want to use.

Contents

Guidelines

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 feedback 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. Your wikipedia account's talk page is sufficient if you check periodically for new messages.
  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 people 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—though not necessarily easy—to run your own wiki and use it for experiments first. Use the MediaWiki software which can be installed on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X - see here and here. 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 wish to do so under a real name or a more congenial pseudonym. It also becomes confusing for other 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 submit 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 policies, "No original research" and "What Wikipedia is not".
    • Original Research To publish or operate original research projects please consider Wikipedia's sister site http://www.wikiversity.org Projects and publication of original data and research activities are expected to remain within the constraints of evolving policy as with any reputable institution. As a site designed to support learning communities, Wikiversity has much greater flexibilty to deal with tailored learning activities and data publication than a prestigious encyclopedia.
  10. There are many other wikis, most with editorial policies different from Wikipedia's. Wikipedia is the world's most-visited wiki, and one of the largest. Wikipedia articles tend to rank high in Google Search results. Wikipedia's prominence attracts a large number of first-time wiki editors, some of whom are unaware that many other wikis exist. Because Wikipedia's editorial policies are much stricter than the ease of article editing may initially suggest, many articles by new editors are deleted. Some new editors would arguably be happier editing elsewhere, for example, on wikis catering to particular subject areas, with less-strict requirements for neutrality, verifiability and no original research. Choose Wikipedia only if you want to participate in the creation of a high-quality free encyclopedia, not simply because it's the first and only wiki you have heard of.

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 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.

Educational template

We have a template that can be easily copied and adopted to create a wiki-syllabus for your course on Wikipedia. See: Wikipedia:School and university projects/Piotrus educational boilerplate.

Suggested exercises

Please add more.

Current projects

Students are invited to add {{EducationalAssignment}} to the Talk page of articles which are created or get significant changes due to an assignment. The ending date and link to the project are optional: {{EducationalAssignment|date=YYYY-MM-DD|link=Wikipedia:School and university projects#PROJECT}}

This article is currently or was the subject of an educational assignment.
This article is currently or was the subject of an 2008-01-01 educational assignment. Further details are available here.


University of Wisconsin-Madison (Fall 2008)

Students in the Hindu Law course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be editing a series of articles related to both Hindu law and Dharmaśāstra. The collaborative project will expand and improve these existing articles and create a number of new (sub-)articles that enhance the information on law, legal theory, legal institutions, and legal history in India, especially in connection to Hindu traditions. The goal is to provide good articles on important subtopics in these fields and to enhance the broader information on Hinduism and Comparative law.

University of British Columbia (Fall 2008)

The University of British Columbia's class SPAN322 ("North of the Río Grande: Latin American Civilization and Culture") is contributing to Wikipedia during Fall 2008. Our collective goals are to bring a selection of articles on Chicano and Latino literature to featured article status (or as near as possible):

Please see our our project page. We welcome help and participation from other Wikipedia editors.

The project coordinator is User:jbmurray. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey (Fall 2007-present)

An assignment was created by Davida Scharf, Director of Reference and Instruction at NJIT's Van Houten Library and tested in both online and face-to-face junior-level technical communication classes taught by Prof. Carol Johnson in the Fall of 2007. The basic assignment was to create a new topic or revise an existing topic on Wikipedia. Some results can be seen at the class website. This project has been incorporated into the syllabi of several other professors at NJIT and will be ongoing.

Amherst College (Spring 2008)

Martha Saxton, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College incorporated Wikipedia into the curriculum of her Women’s History course (1865 to the present) in the Spring 2008 semester. Students participated in improving the gender balance of Wikipedia entries. Since students use Wikipedia as a source, it seemed valuable to work to understand it and improve it, both for the value of intervening with well researched and transparently documented articles, but also as a way to make the research, editing, and bibliographic processes through which scholarship is produced transparent to young historians.

In scrolling through various articles on Wikipedia it became clear that women show up only occasionally as subjects of biographies, and that they are barely integrated into the general historical articles like Early America. Fifteen students, enrolled in her Women’s History course, selected articles that they wished to revise to include the participation and contributions of women. In each case, students did an initial critique of the existing article, laying out what their own interventions would be. Two, for example, decided to work on the article on the Shakers and Mother Ann Lee. One student included material on women in the American Federation of Labor, and another worked on early labor activity. Others worked on topics as disparate as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the California Gold Rush and Social Security. They then worked up drafts of their proposed revisions. Those went through two or more rewrites for brevity, accuracy and balance. The students inserted their final revisions into the Wikipedia articles on May 15, 2008.

Two students from the Spring 2007 course on women in early America took this course as well. They collaborated on an essay describing their experiences of having their articles edited. They categorized the types of edits that occurred and looked into the motivation behind different kinds of interventions, exploring various kinds of biases, their intellectual results, and the implications for a balanced Wikipedia.

At the end of the semester, the students drafted a description of their project and its significance in beginning to create a balanced version of our nation's history. Working together, they produced a declaration outlining the need for the project and its methodology. The endeavor is called the Amherst College Gender Equality Project.

American University (Spring 2008)

Professor: Chris Simpson

This American University School of Communication project prepares graduate students to research, write, post, and edit carefully referenced new articles. We emphasize incremental contributions to existing Wikipedia articles on selected aspects of public affairs, followed by monitoring subsequent comments and edits. The course also discusses arguments found in Y. Benkler's Wealth of Networks that concern 'social production' and Wikipedia.


Columbus State University (Spring 2008)

Students in Developmental Biology are collaborating to create an article on Dictyostelium discoideum and its importance as a model system in developmental biology. The goals of the assignment are to create an article of value to the developmental biology community and to give students an opportunity to experience collaborative writing.

University of Hong Kong (Spring 2008)

For this Spring 2008 assignment, U21/HKU Human Security students (undergraduates) were asked to contribute substantive information on Human security to Wikipedia. The objective of this assignment was to contribute to the comprehensive and balanced coverage of Human Security on Wikipedia. The instructor LMCinHK started a Wikipedia article in 2006, entitled Human security, then provided students with specific parameters for how to edit/expand/cut that article. In order to improve the quality of their submissions, the students this semester will be doing their initial write-ups on a course wiki prior to submitting their work to Wikipedia. The course will end in mid May 2008.

Gloucester County College, Library & Communications Dept. (Spring 2008)

  • COM101 Information Literacy Alternate Project: Wikipedia article

Offered as an alternate information literacy assignment in the spring 2008 semester in Christine Herz's English Composition class, the assignment was to create a new article or revise an existing article on Wikipedia. The course ends in May 2008. Some of the projects can be viewed from the class website.

New Bulgarian University, History of Culture Department (Fall 2007/Spring 2008 and ongoing)

Lecturers and students from the History of Culture Department at the New Bulgarian University initiated the "Arts and Culture" Wikiproject in Bulgarian-language Wikipedia. The project aims at the development and improvement of free encyclopedic content in these two fields of knowledge, with special emphasis on the ancient arts, philosophy, religion and culture which bloomed on the territories of Bulgaria and Greece. The team is using the Wikipedia project for written assignments during the courses in Ancient Religion, Ancient Greek Culture and Art, Thracian Culture and Art, Byzantine Art, Art of Medieval Bulgaria, Art of the Renaissance.

A month before the start of the project, a coordination meeting was held, during which basic aspects of Wikipedian philosophy and functioning were presented in front of the students. Participation in the project is voluntary and not limited to the students from the NBU. The project members also obtain technical support from other more experienced Wikipedians. Maintained are a list of the members, lists of red links to prospective new articles, stubs to be expanded, and lists of already written and edited articles and categories.

Interdisciplinary and Wiki: A Match Made in Heaven (timeframe not specified)

Wikipedia is a very useful resource for teaching interdisciplinarity because it is inherently interdisciplinary. Wikipedia is similar to interdisciplinarity in how both require the contributions of many people from a wide variety of backgrounds in order to present a truly holistic view of any topic. No complete encyclopedia could be written exclusively from the point of view of any one discipline. For example, if Wikipedia were created only by scientists it would be missing important information about history and social issues. Similarly, students of interdisciplinary studies are taught that in order to fully understand real-world situations and issues, one must apply the methods and knowledge of multiple disciplines. In addition, actively working on Wikipedia teaches students how to write intelligently for a variety of audiences and how to work constructively with other editors. Such applied learning is more rewarding and more effective than traditional classroom teaching. It stimulates the students' desire to excel and their interest in what they are doing because they know that their work will be seen by others. The students are forced to think interdisciplinarily in order to contribute meaningful information to such a comprehensive project. Both Wikipedia and interdisciplinary thinking rely on links and connections between traditionally segregated fields. Every properly formatted Wikipedia article links to many others, allowing readers to discover ties between seemingly unrelated subjects. Similarly, interdisciplinarity often involves connecting aspects of different disciplines to form a new and unique area of study.

Commonwealth of Learning's Wikieducator (timeframe not specified)

Wikieducator is a community resource supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for the development of free educational content. COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

  • planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
  • development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
  • work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
  • networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia (Spring 2008)

Professor Mara Scanlon is teaching a Long Poem seminar and her students have been working on a collaborative article in a stand alone MediaWiki to frame the history and significance of this poetic genre. As of April 1st, 2008, they created the Long poem Wikipedia article and are currently working on formatting it correctly, citations, and various other details. Jgroom (talk) 09:22, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

University of Karlsruhe, Institute for Geography and Geoecology (Spring 2008)

Graduate students in a geography class with Dr Christophe Neff "will analyse the content of wikipedia articles concerning the geography of southern France with special focus to Leucate, Corbières and (MTE) Mediterranean type ecosystems (and botanical articles concerning mediterranean plants). Furthermore they will compare the different wikis (en,fr, de, es etc.)". [1] Splash - tk 13:37, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (Spring 2008) (Ongoing)

Professor Kristan Wheaton teaches an Intelligence Communications course twice yearly, part of which includes a publication assignment. In Spring 2008, he assigned a dozen students to contribute new articles on topics he preapproved in the areas of intelligence reform, analytical techniques, etc. He plans to continue these assignments in the future, having found the experience effective in teaching online collaboration, publication, and research skills. See Professor Wheaton's blog for a list of the articles and his feedback on the assignment. --Pat (talk) 02:25, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Savannah College of Art and Design (Spring 2008) (Ongoing)

In Spring 2008, students in Professor Lambin's undergraduate level Historic Preservation Law class took on the task of expanding on the Wiki content related to historic preservation law. There is a tremendous body of relevant historic preservation case law out there, but, for the non-practitioner, it can be challenging to find and interpret. It is hoped that these new expanded articles will make this information more readily accessible to preservationists. Students were able to choose from a range of pre-approved articles. Some students will create new articles, while others will expand on existing content such as articles on major pieces of historic preservation legislation, including the National Historic Preservation Act. This will be an on-going assignment and will take the place of the final research paper. In Winter 2009 it will take the place of the final research paper. To learn more or to provide comment, contact Professor Lambin in Talk. A list of completed articles is coming soon.

Oakland University Department of Art & Art History (Fall 2008)

Students in Professor Corso's courses, Art History 101:Introduction to Western Art and Art History 291: Concepts of Modern and Postmodern Art, will edit existing Wikipedia articles on Western art, paying attention to both Wikipedia:Five Pillars and Strunk and White's guidelines in The Elements of Style. Further information will be posted shortly.

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill Department of American Studies (Fall 2008)(Ongoing)

Freshmen students in Professor Foster's course on American Indian Law, History, and Literature will be expanding and creating new Wiki content related to four major areas of American Indian law and history through small groups. Individuals in each group will focus on particular sections under the major areas. This will be an on-going assignment. Details on each area of focus will be provided soon. Feel free to contact Professor Foster in Talk if you have suggestions and advice, as we are all 'noobs' to this process.--Tolfoster (talk) 03:01, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

The University of Texas at Dallas, Department of Geosciences (Fall 2008)

GEOS 4320 (The Physics and Chemistry of the Solid Earth) – An undergraduate class co-taught by Dr. Robert Stern and Dr. John Ferguson. The class will be creating or greatly expanding an article on a subject relating to the class for a final project (due at the end of the semester). More information to come.

Planned projects

The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (March 2008)

The University of Sydney's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering will begin an undergraduate project in 2008.

Past projects

Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal (Spring 2008)

Virgilio A. P. Machado taught another offering of a course in logistics to mostly industrial engineering undergraduate students. Their assignment (Portuguese) was to learn wiki and write articles related to logistics in the Portuguese Wikipedia. Two students from Greece registered for the course, so the project was also developed in the English Wikipedia. Project ended July 31, 2008.

vapmachado talk.cw 19:02, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

University of Pittsburgh sociology (summer 2008)

SOC 0005 (Societies, an introductory course to sociology) will have about 8 groups, 5 student each, improving a sociology related article on Wikipedia, with the end goal of nominating it for a Good Article status. The course will last from late June to end of July. Course page: User:Piotrus/Teaching assignment. Course instructor: User:Piotrus. The project has ended. Results:

Group 1: stages of growth model from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Group 2: sexual script from no article to C-class: after

Group 3: military sociology from no article to C-class: after

Group 4: macrosociology from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Group 5: technophobia from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Students also have an option to gain extra credit from optional individual projects. Several have chosen to do so, see details in Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/User:Piotrus/Summer_2008#Individual_extra_credit_edits, with good results (for example, the creation and expansion of sociology of film article).

Leeward Community College Upward Bound (summer 2008)

Instructor: Dayle Turner

English expository writing class (Eng 22: Introduction to Expository Writing) which had 9 students. Writing assignments for the class were all based on Wikipedia articles. The main assignment was to write an article for Wikipedia, using the rubric for Wikipedia:Good article criteria. Topics were chosen from Wikipedia:Requested articles and were approved by the instructor. Drafts of articles were revised and edited on individual userspace pages for each student. Drafts underwent peer and instructor review and editing before submission to Wikipedia mainspace. The course lasted from mid June to mid July. Course page: User:Eng22. Course blog.

To see the assignments and links to the articles students wrote for Wikipedia, see the Eng22 page for this course.

--Eng22 (talk) 06:53, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Texas A&M University (Spring 2008)

Lecturer: Adrienne Brundage

Our Forensic Entomology course worked in groups to prepare and post articles relative to Forensic Entomology. Students were required to throughly research each subject before posting, then monitor comments and edits for a grade. Please direct any questions, comments or suggestions to me. I am hoping to make this a yearly project that evolves as the semesters progress.

This year's project went very well. While some students did drop the ball (as is common with any project given in a course), most of the students enjoyed the project immensely. The idea that they were writing for a very large audience drove them to put more work into the project than they would have otherwise (and thus complain about the amount of work they were putting in more than they would have otherwise). They also got to experience feedback in many forms from someone other than me. I think that may have been the greatest challenge and lesson they learned--not everyone will bend over backwards to spare their feelings, and they are unable to control what everyone says about their work. I also required that they take ALL feedback, good and bad, into account. This was tough for many, but it made them better writers.

Project Website Course Website


University of Pittsburgh (Spring 2008)

Students of Social Change in United States (with professor Salvatore Babones and teaching assistant Piotr Konieczny) will be using Wikipedia for written assignments with the aim of creating content related to 1) deindustrialization and Neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 22:35, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Assignment completed, the article diff before and after.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 19:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

University of British Columbia (Spring 2008)

The University of British Columbia's class SPAN312 ("Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation") contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. Our collective goals were to bring a selection of articles to "Featured" status (or as near as possible). In the end, we contributed three featured articles, seven good articles, and one B-class article:

See also:

The project coordinator was User:Jbmurray. --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 17:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Truman State University (Fall 2007)

Interdisciplinary Studies

Scott Alberts, an associate professor of Statistics at Truman State University, is using Wikipedia for a project in his Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies course (IDS 175). The course examines the 'discipline,' of Interdisciplinary Studies, and the nature of what makes disciplines distinct. In addition, the class will examine topics through several interdisciplinary lenses, and try to look at them beyond disciplinary boundaries. Also, the students are forced to think interdisciplinarily in order to contribute meaningful information to such a comprehensive project. The class is also using contract grading in which students sign a contract saying exactly what grade they would like to receive and how much work they would like to do.

Wiki Labs

In Dr. Alberts' “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies” course there are six wiki-labs. Students of the course are required to complete Labs 0, 1, 2, and 3. Labs 4, 5, and 6 are an option for the contract grade.

  • Lab 0: Welcome to Wiki

Students are asked to explore Wikipedia and find the shortest or most interesting path from “Death Star” to “Kevin Bacon,” and create a clever username for their account.

  • Lab 1: Set Up Yourself

By setting up their user page, students become more comfortable with using Wikipedia. Students add to their page the Truman State University userbox, and a Babel box. The final step to this project is to link the students’ page to Dr. Alberts’ Page and vice versa.

  • Lab 2: Be Active; Get Busy; Don’t Hurt Yourself
  • Lab 3: Work Collaboratively

The class must work together to work on 3 pages: the Truman State University page. Interdisciplinary page, and the contract grading page.

  • Lab 4: Write a Real Article
  • Lab 5 and 6: Focus. Choose one or more of: Make an article "good," join a Project, or work on reverse links or other special pages.


Barcelona University and Washington University in St. Louis (Fall 2007)

Wikipedia:WikiProject History and Archaeology of Central Asia

As part of the courses History and Archaeology of Asia (256118) taught by Sebastian Stride the University of Barcelona, and Ancient Civilization of the Old World, taught by Michael Frachetti at the University of Washington Saint Louis.

Students are required to edit or write articles concerning the History and Archaeology of Central Asia.

Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and will work in collaboration with at least one other student, preferably from another university. Students will be expected to write or edit the articles in either catalan, french, english, italian, russian or spanish. Discussion will take place on the english language version of each article but will not necessarily be in english.

Supervisors: We, Michael Frachetti and Sebastian Stride will take care of introducing studends to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines. However, being ourselves novices, any help and suggestions are welcome!

Start date: The project begun in Fall 2007

Status: At that moment it has led to no editing other than that on the project pages. Please direct any comments to our user talk page or to the project talk page.

Technion - Graduate seminar on detection and estimation (Winter 2007-2008)

A graduate-level seminar on theory and applications of statistical signal processing, specifically detection and estimation theory, took place in the Technion in the winter 2008 semester (Jan.-Apr. 2008). Among other tasks, each student was assigned a topic for which there was no article in WP, or a short article needing a major rewrite. The student wrote a concise article (1-2 printed pages), which was reviewed by the course staff and then incorporated into WP by the student.

Pages created/expanded:

University of Washington (Fall 2007)

Art History: Northern Baroque Art

The Northern Baroque Art class is undertaking the editing of the new article Marie de' Medici cycle, about a series of paintings commissioned of Peter Paul Rubens by Marie de' Medici for her home at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

Until November 9th, students will add entries to the article with complete references, as well as making edits to the article for readability and accuracy.

Ohio University (2007)

Student teams from classes in Introduction to Sociology and Research Techniques are working to expand current articles in the Sociology WikiProject, and adding new pages on topics that are similarly basic to the discipline.

Students have created their own Wikipedia login IDs and have been encouraged to make some basic edits to their user page, to practice editing at the sandbox, and to familiarize themselves with wikipedia the resource, as well as Wikipedia the community.

Student groups are performing literature reviews, beginning with textbooks and review articles. For more depth we are working to identify the most appropriate primary texts, both books and peer reviewed journal articles. A major emphasis in this literature review and writing process to find at least two high quality sources that can provide templates for the overall discussion of a topic, and to flesh out that topic with published research from the field of sociology.

  • Course staff: Professor Howard T. Welser; Htw3.


University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Associate Prof. Andrew Collin's [1] immunology class of 2007 are editing articles related to immunology. These edits have been outlined on an external wiki and are currently being moved to the English wikipedia. Contributers include user:Acute angle. The class's contributions were publicized in The Sydney Morning Herald in October 2007. [2]

The College of Idaho (Winter Session 2008)

Students in Professor Steven S. Maughan's history course, The Terror: Language, Radicalism, and Violence in the French Revolution, 1789-1799, will work to critique and improve biographical entries on notable French Revolutionary figures. Each will create her or his own Wikipedia login ID, will become familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource, and will refine and expand a biographical entry drawing on high-quality scholarly sources.

The assignments, based on templates provided for past Wikipedia course projects, will be completed by mid-Feb. 2008.

University of Toronto (Winter 2008)

Students in Danny Heap's Computers and Society course CSC 300 in the 2008 winter session are improving sets of Wikipedia articles pertaining to current course material dealing with how computers effect society. The main topics of this course to be handled are history of computers, ethics, professionalism, privacy, intellectual property, computers and work, the net, trust in cyberspace, censorship, and computers and development.

University of California, Davis (Fall 2007)

Phoebe Ayers worked with Dr. Ken Verosub to teach a freshman seminar on Wikipedia. Topics included an introduction to the site, policies and community, doing research, copyright and copyleft. One major assignment included comparing Wikipedia articles with the equivalent article in Encyclopedia Britannica, in the model of the Nature study. Send questions to phoebe: phoebe / (talk) 22:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC).

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey (Fall 2007)

An assignment was created by Davida Scharf, Director of Reference and Instruction at NJIT's Van Houten Library and tested in both online and face-to-face junior-level technical communication classes taught by Prof. Carol Johnson in the Fall of 2007. The basic assignment was to create a new topic or revise an existing topic on Wikipedia. Some results can be seen at the class website.

University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky Fall of 2007

Associate Professor Dr. Tom Mueller teaches a course entitled Soil Use and Management. This semester, the students are working on a Project where they are required to make submissions to Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SoilMan2007 (talk • contribs) 19:15, 2 December 2007


The College of Idaho (Fall 2007)

Students in Professor Steven S. Maughan's history course, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, will work to critique and improve biographical entries on notable European historical figures. Each will create her or his own Wikipedia login ID, will become familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource, and will refine and expand a biographical entry drawing on high-quality scholarly sources.

The assignments, based on templates provided for past Wikipedia course projects, will be completed by Dec. 2007.


University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2007)

Dr. Stuart W. Shulman's class on Digital Citizenship is going to improve the article on digital divide. User:Piotrus is assisting.

The project has ended. While the article has not reached a GA level, it has been improved close to it (before after). Thanks to all who contributed (including of course many editors unaffiliated with the project!).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 12:48, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

ITESM Campus Toluca - Advanced B English Course (2007)

Leigh Thelmadatter's English as a foreign language class made contributions to the English and Spanish Wikipedia sites as the focus of an academic writing and cultural adaptation class. Students were encouranged to edit and create articles about their home country. In most cases, this country is Mexico; however, other Latin American countries are sometimes represented in the class. For this reason, students were required to work with the appropriate WikiProject for their country. This course was also the subject of a research project on the part of the teacher concerning "authentic" writing assignments and their value to very advanced EFL learners.

Pages that were contributed as final projects include Amecameca Cosmovitral Amboró National Park Plan of Tuxtepec Mexico 68 Mythology of MexicoChabelo Manuel AcuñaTenango del ValleIxtapan de la Sal Atlacomulco Amar te duele and San Mateo Atenco.

Thelmadatter 21:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter


Oberlin College (Spring 2007)

Elizabeth Colantoni, a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Oberlin College, used Wikipedia in her undergraduate level course "The Eternal City: Ancient Rome Built, Imagined, and Remembered." Each student in the course evaluated a Wikipedia article about an ancient Roman monument as part of a research project. Articles were evaluated for accuracy, having up-to-date information, being too short or overly verbose, having useful and active links, references to print media, and whether it provided, on the whole, a good source for someone who wants to learn about the monument. Students were encouraged to edit the articles to improve any perceived short comings. If there was no article, students created a short article. Articles involved in the project had their talk pages tagged with an identifying template. The project concluded in May 2007.

  • "Oberlin College history class told to use controversial site", Cleveland Plain Dealer article [3]

Northwestern University (Spring 2007)

Anise K. Strong, a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Northwestern University, made Wikipedia contribution a central part of her general Roman Civilization class of 115 students. Each student in the course edited or originated a Roman history "stub" article on Wikipedia, ranging from the province of Gallia Aquitania to the house of Julia Felix in Pompeii. Each article contained references to at least one primary source from the ancient world (including images), one encyclopedic source, and one scholarly book or article. Each student also evaluated and commented on two-three other related student-written articles on their discussion pages. The project concluded on May 18th, 2007. You can go to click here for the full list of articles.

University of East Anglia (Spring 2007)

Nicola Pratt, is using Wik