There is a serious point to this one...honestly. People are always having a pop at Wikipedia - and whilst some of it may be justified, it isn't always. One of the things about a community based resource is that it can only ever be as good as the community is prepared to make it. Also it is really just the latest in a long line of things that exist in the world that can be used sensibly or..er...not. Previously, it might have been just the lecturers notes given back verbatum, single text book research, Encarta, Google....but we can't (shouldn't) tell people not to use them we should help them "DF" and know how/when/why/when not to use them. But at the same time we could try to do right be the people using those sites and live the ethos. So my challenge is:
Taking a work related topic in Wikipedia, could you...
- get a piece of information published into an existing Wikipedia article
- add a reference where there is a "citation required" flag
- add a whole new article or at least a stub on an topic area
- follow a couple of references from the bottom of the article and learn something you didn't know before
- spot something that is inaccurate or contentious and report it
This is obviously a long game challenge but could be a great exercise to have a go at. If you fancy trying and making some notes about what you have been able to achieve, the issues emerging, viability of these activities as learning opportunities - sign up by commenting on this post. Then let's meet in about a month and reflect on how it went.
Don't worry guys, I've got a plan for a blog/conference related game and a competition but this was just too good an opportunity to miss.
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2 comments:
This is a bit more of a challenge than we expected, as our IP address is blocked due to vandalism. Ho hum.
But all is not lost. I've set up a personal account at via the secure server at https://secure.wikimedia.org/
So nothing can stop us now.
Evil laughter reverberates out from the Adsetts Centre...
I don't understand the IP thing - is that one of the global SHU IP addresses? [alert - I don't know what I'm talking about, this is a bit dark arts for me] - could be severely limiting if we wanted to use something like this for assessment - I'm going to a session about this later in the week, I'll see how they have dealt with it.
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