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A comment on Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate. Parent comment

Re:Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plag... by vickytnz on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @05:56PM (#5482407)
As someone who's being involved with wikedit days (e.g. for Women in Science) and also in academia, I think this was a typical 'good idea, terrible execution'. The washup from 2011 noted that not many people did it, and those that did weren't very useful. And probably should be later on in university curricula (sad but true): letting first year undergrads at it is asking for trouble.
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Re:Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plag... by alexchamberlain on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @06:00PM (#5482436)
But there's nothing stopping them doing it in their own time. I've edited a couple of articles here and there and, had I have found an error in a Maths article in my first year, I would have edited without a second thought.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Alex_Cham...

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Re:Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plag... by table on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @11:29PM (#5484058)
The problem is that they're giving students an incentive to make edits, but not checking the quality of those edits. That's a recipe for a lot of bad edits.
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