Students citing Wikipedia can expect to get Fs on their term papers. But write for Wikipedia, and those same students could get all As in one Boston University professor’s class.
Professor of public policy and law David Weil is encouraging students in the graduate program at the School of Management to help Wikipedia generate public policy articles for the massive online encyclopedia in his class “Public Policy Analysis: Public Roles in Private Markets,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokeswoman said.
Weil’s class is just one of many in Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative, which partners universities with the foundation to create content for its most popular site.
“Wikipedia is often peoples’ first reference when they want a general overview about important topics like public policy,” said LiAnna Davis, a spokeswoman for Wikimedia.
Davis said having articles authored by students is an asset to the website.
“Having accurate, unbiased information available about these topics written by students who are studying them is critically important,” Davis said.
Weil said the project would help him both in his teaching and his research.
“It struck me as a great idea and would allow me to both help students get a better feel of the nature of public policy to-date,” Weil said.
“It will also introduce them to the nature of trying to separate out values from facts in a real way and a way to preserve their work and contribute to something beyond a research paper.”
The project covers 31 courses at 22 universities this semester, Davis said.
“Professor Weil’s public policy class has been a great introduction to learning about the benefits of policy reform and action, coupled with an interesting, hands-on project with Wikipedia,” said SMG graduate student Dee Falvo.
“The great part is that each student gets to explore a topic of personal interest and relevance.”
The specific policy areas examined by Weil’s students cover a variety of topics including movie production incentives in the United States to benefits for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Before students could begin their work with Wikipedia, Weil said he was faced with the challenge of fusing his course with the guidelines and structure of the website.
“It did require a big change in how I structure the class,” Weil said. “I knew it would involve some work but I didn’t realize quite how much work it would take.”
Despite the challenges, Weil said he is glad he agreed to work with Wikimedia.
“I think the class and the whole initiative is going to be very useful in generating content that is going to be very useful far beyond just what turns up for the members of this class from a typical research project,” Weil said
Davis said the collaboration has been as beneficial to Wikimedia as it has been for Weil and his students.
“We’re thrilled that so many universities like BU have joined the Public Policy Initiative,” Davis said. “It’s really rewarding for us to see students get very engaged by writing for a resource they use all the time, and we hope they will keep editing even after their class is over.”
Davis said Wikimedia plans on expanding the program beyond public policy and outside the United States.
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I’ve asked multiple journalists as well as representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation, yet I get no answer. This Wikimedia Foundation “outreach” to college campuses was funded in part by a $1.2 million tax-exempt grant from the Stanton Foundation. Why does it cost $1.2 million to teach college students how to do something that doesn’t cost a dime to do, and that hundreds of thousands of other “regular” people have somehow learned to do on their own, without on-campus hand-holding?
I suppose the money ends up being spent the way it was spent here:
http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikijunior-took-the-money-but-no-books-printed
Leave it to the Wikimedia Foundation to perfect the waste of larger and larger scales of dough.
Eh, don’t worry about what Kohs says. He’s been trolling blogs and news articles posting that kind of crap for years, since he was banned from Wikipedia around 2006.
This crap is insulting to anyone who’s ever run the sort of pilot program that Wikimedia is doing. Seriously?
“Why does it cost $1.2 million to teach college students how to do something that doesn’t cost a dime to do …”
It doesn’t cost a dime to do trigonometry or linear algebra (though if you can’t do it in your head perhaps you’ll shell out a little for a pencil and some paper). It doesn’t cost a dime to understand the nuances of literature or to sing beautiful songs. But we the public pay extraordinary amounts of money to learn how to do these things that enrich us all, to learn how to do them well.
Developing a program that university professors can practically use, employing a couple of people to work on it, and coordinating all this across… what did the article say, 32 universities? Sure. You could probably get volunteers to do it, but you’ll need to find the right ones, and wait for them to have time to work on it, and hope that they will pull through. The Stanton Foundation’s $1.2M seems to have made this project a success by providing the input needed to get the job done here and now. I know it’s a success because I’m commenting here… it’s taken off and people are talking about it.
Mr. Kohs, why don’t you contact the Stanton Foundation and ask about just how glad they are with what’s been accomplished so far? I don’t think you’ll get anything to fuel your unfounded criticism.