Juliet
Hi have done something like this as part of my Undergraduate course on 
HIV/Aids in Africa. It’s one of four “group action projects” designed to 
challenge students to present academic debates in a format accessible to 
a specific non-specialist audience – and to take learning and assessment 
‘beyond the classroom’. They are:

1.Poster on HIV/AIDS in Africa to be presented at a named venue in the 
town – aimed at a specific audience (with accompanying leaflets etc)
2.A presentation to community organisation (or similar)
3.A website on HIV/AIDS in Africa
4.A Wikipedia entry on HIV AIDS in Africa

Generally speaking I think these offer great alternative to the standard 
essay or oral presentation. I run these projects as group projects – 
although if you have smaller classes than I do you could make them 
individual assessments.

My advice:
1.Work off line:
a.While wiki (and websites) can be written directly to the web – 
consider whether this is really what you want to do. Some students will 
produce poor work. I do not want my students confusing wiki readers or 
web browsers with poor materials. Get students to produce and submit 
work off line – and then upload the excellent projects after assessment.

b.Wiki is publicly editable – so your students' work might be edited by 
unknown others (of good or ill) before you have had a chance to assess 
it and allocate them a mark.


2.Think carefully about issues of ‘academic misconduct’, plagiarism, 
originality etc. and the difference that assessments aimed at producing 
websites makes to these issues, and your use, or not, of detectors such 
as ‘TurnitinUK’.

a.Problems of plagiarism the need for students to submit ‘their own 
work’ are another good reason not to work online where non-students 
might edit the entry.
You could run a more dynamic assessment than the one I run, involving 
collaborative input from communities, or from the global wiki community 
– etc – but only if you have worked out how to map this activity onto 
local institutional marking criteria and degree expectations.

b.Encourage students not just to drag and drop material into their 
websites and entries if you are using detection software, and or, want 
the sited to be more than descriptive of existing literature.

3.Be clear about exactly what you are looking for:
a. Presentation and academic content: Whenever you give students the 
opportunity to use alternative formats – they can get carried away with 
the format and presentation and neglect the critical academic content, 
debates, critique, literature etc – and over invest in layout etc. 
Similarly, be clear if are you looking simply for definitions (which 
might be quite descriptive) or whether you are looking for critical 
analysis and appraisal.
Students can legitimately claim they simply copied ‘the house style’ of 
similar web pages or wiki entries - unless you explicitly remind them of 
your local grade related criteria that demand – for example ‘insight and 
reflection’ – ‘strong thread of critically argument’ or what ever.

b.Technical competence: related to issues above – decide whether your 
assessment involving the production of web pages or wiki entries – is 
intended to test students' technical abilities or not – and whether they 
will receive marks for being able to use of particular software  - e.g. 
Dreamweaver or similar. Again students can get very side tracked into 
perfecting these skills when you intended that they focus on academic 
content and debate – and would have been quite happy with a word file.

d.Finally if students use word to produce HTML compatible files – it's 
best not to upload these to the web – because they are full of 
electronic gibberish that make it very difficult for those with 
disabilities using ‘read aloud’ software.
Hope that’s useful
Mike


On 10/01/2011 10:07, Juliet Fall wrote:
> Hello dear critters,
>
> A quick question about teaching: I am toying with the idea of getting geography Master's students to write and maintain entries for the French version of Wikipedia over one semester -- the French version is, currently, rather dreadful on geographical entries, and on biographies of geographers.
> (Masters programme at the University of Geneva: http://www.unige.ch/ses/geo/etudes/Master-1.html)
>
> I'd be very grateful if anyone had some insight, feedback, publications or resources to pass on  -- or candid opinions that this is a dreadful idea!
>
> Happy New Year to all!
>
> Juliet
>
>
> Juliet Fall
> Professeure Associée (Associate professor)
> Département de géographie -- Université de Genève -- Boulevard du Pont d'Arve 40 -- CH-1211 Genève 4
> Tel. +41 22 379 9894

-- 
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Senior Lecturer in Geography

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