Scanning the cited examples of plagiarism suggests that some of the alleged "unreasonably close paraphrasing" wasn't actually that close, the text insertions were generally short and referenced, and the 85% stat wasn't reflected in the assessments other editors (who picked up other issues) made of other students' work. Are they any worse than the average edits introduced by other novice editors which don't get such forensic scrutiny? Probably not.

If you'd prefer the world's most popular anonymously-editable website to be a carefully-curated collection of articles written largely by experienced editors (which a lot of the experienced editors evidently do) then you'd wouldn't want this class anywhere near it. But I think Wikipedia has bigger problems to fix.

It stretches credulity to suggest it's akin to vandalism.