FERPA http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa

I can't give information that would identify a student or allow someone to make direct contact without the student's prior consent.

If that's the case, then obtaining the students' consent to release their Wikipedia username (which could be a random string of characters with no identifying information) needs to be a precondition of the students' participating in the assignment.

If a professor has 1700 students start editing Wikipedia and 85% of them are plagiarizing, that's a huge burden to place on the Wikipedia volunteer community to clean up. There are a limited number of volunteers who handle copyright and plagiarism issues and it is unfair for a professor to increase their workload without giving them information about which users are making changes that need to be scrutinized.

The problem here is that the professor has refused to engage the Wikipedia community and has, in his own words, gone underground.

"obtaining the students' consent to release their Wikipedia username (which could be a random string of characters with no identifying information) needs to be a precondition of the students' participating in the assignment."

Why?

"If a professor has 1700 students start editing Wikipedia and 85% of them are plagiarizing"

This is still a number pulled from the air.

>...needs to be a precondition of the students' participating in the assignment.

I don't think it wise or fair to extort their consent.

The link you provided appears to be dead. However, the first two resources I found (one from KSU and one from UT) suggest that your reading of FERPA is overly strict. Directory information such as a student name can be released without the student's consent. Also, according to UT: "Ferpa applies to personally identifiable information in educational records." If a student chose a random string of characters as a username I don't see how that's personally identifiable.

https://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Clearinghouse/View-Arti... http://registrar.utexas.edu/students/records/ferpa

Sorry about the link, I just c+p'd without checking because I figured it hadn't changed since Dec. Here's an older blurb: http://www.ed.gov/technology/draft-netp-2010/FERPA

It's very strange, and there is a lot of mis-information perpetrated upon us in our annual FERPA training sessions. College Administration provide no useful guidance either, other than hiring a person to come and hyperventilate on stage for us at our annual faculty convocation. But, one thing that is pretty clear is that I may not reveal my class rolls to the public. Examples cited are abusive ex-spouses / intimates stalking students by learning their schedules and following them home to learn their new address, attack them, or both.