Comments on: Wikipedia: A scientific and educational opportunity

By: Emilio Bruna

Emilio Bruna — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:28:43 +0000

Hi all, thanks for the kind words. I will look into Citizendium, which looks like a really fascinating alternative. And Ethan, thanks for the head’s up – I’m about to head to your blog.
Emilio

By: Daniel Mietchen

Daniel Mietchen — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:43:09 +0000

I congratulate Emilio and his students for this successful class and I agree with most of what they said here (have yet to read the paper). I would add, though, that an alternative exists for assigning wiki articles as course work, and that is the Eduzendium initiative over at Citizendium, a newer wiki with real names and expert review (cf. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Eduzendium ). Citizendium currently vanishes in both breadth and depth when compared to the English Wikipedia (though much less so when it comes to topics that may be relevant for course work) but the editing atmosphere there is more friendly, and newcomers won’t be greeted by having their edits reverted. A currently ongoing course can be found at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Biol_201:_General_Microbiology .

By: Ethan White

Ethan White — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:02:08 +0000

I really like the idea of helping students start using newer approaches to communication and information delivery. This approach of contributing to wikipedia articles has the added advantage of improving the quality of the scientific content available to the general public. I’ve been introducing my students to blogging this semester (http://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2009/03/25/starting-young-getting-ecologists-to-blog/) with generally encouraging results.