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Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

Speaking at the Educause 2007 conference this past week, University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom gave a speech on using Wikipedia to "reimagine" the term paper. Feeling that her students were not getting the most out of the experience writing a paper where the end results was being thrown away after only the professor would read it, Groom felt that she would experiment with one of the more popular sites on the Internet, and one that allows anybody to add to it at that.

Although it seems like a great idea, and in theory it did work, this was a colossal failure. It worked because the students did become more invested in their work (all but one), according to a survey of the students at least. In addition, Groom felt that the work produced by her students surpassed that of what she was used to seeing in a standard situation, such as a paper written by them.

The reason that this was a failure was from the reaction from the Wikipedia elite. As anybody who frequents Wikipedia can tell you (especially somebody who has ever made an edit), anything you add will be removed within 20-30 minutes because you don't have a PhD in something, and even so there's a ton of reasons for somebody to revert your edit. Basically, all of the students' articles were either deleted or the lucky ones got merged into existing articles, which is probably an even worse feeling than getting your paper back with an F on it.

Wikipedia is a great site, and it carries so much potential. It has snowballed into a hub of information, and although many people will tell you that since anybody can edit it, you might be getting bad information, the editors that do nothing but watch over Wikipedia would say otherwise. Unfortunately, these are also the people who will stifle your attempts at adding new content. All in all, its a win-lose situation, a win for people who want to use Wikipedia to learn something (also for us who don't want it getting spammed), while its a lose to these kids who could've taught us all something new.