Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.
“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren't very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.
To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia's web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.
To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”
Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.
As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”
In May, three entries created by nine students in the course became the first student works to reach Wikipedia's top rank.
Their articles, about the book “El Se
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