Wikipedia:School and university projects/2003-2008 past projects

University of Málaga (Fall 2007 to Fall 2008) [in Spanish language]
Starting in Fall 2007, wikipedia projects were assigned to sophomore computer science students as an experience for the adaptation to the European Higher Education Area following the Bologna Process. Such projects involved the creation and/or revamping of entries in the Spanish wikipedia related to Abstract data types and Algorithms. Each project was done by a group of 2-3 students, and included topics such as, e.g., stacks, queues, heaps, Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming and Branch and Bound among more than 30 thematic items. This experience took place during two academic years.

University of Michigan - Graduate Level Chemistry (fall 2008)
In Fall 2008, a graduate course in physical organic chemistry (26 students) added content in the area of transition state theory, asymmetric induction, chiral lewis acid, benson group increment theory, the hammett equation, the taft equation, halogen bonding, hyperconjugation, and pi-interactions. Questions to User:UMChemProfessor (talk) 14:38, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Gloucester County College (Fall 2008 and ongoing)
Offered as an alternate information literacy assignment in the spring 2008 semester in Christine Herz's English Composition class, the assignment was to create a new article or revise an existing article. See the following page for a list of student projects: COM101 Wikipedia article.

University of Saskatchewan (Fall 2008)
A first-year Religious Studies course (Religious Studies 110) has been divided into small groups (3-5 students) and assigned the task of fact-checking, editing and expanding 28 articles related to Chinese religions. This project was assigned in September 2008 and will terminate in November 2008. User:Usask_RelSt110

University of San Francisco (Fall 2008)
Dr. Silver's (user:Davidms) Intro to Media Studies to work on improving University of San Francisco and similar articles. See Wikiproject University of San Francisco. Questions to phoebe / (talk to me) 04:21, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Columbus State University (Fall 2008)
A first-year composition class is adding content to film pages and/or creating film pages. Students were first oriented to Wikipedia using the Five Pillars and WikiProject Films. They are asked to research the film in Wikipedia and, cross referencing with WikiProject Films, to determine the essential rhetorical elements of a good film page. They then propose edits to existing film pages, or the creation of new pages, using the talk pages. This project will conclude in November, 2008. --Bob Cummings (talk) 14:36, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Cornell University (Fall 2008)
A junior/senior level engineering course of 9 students is adding content in the area of bioseparations (purification of proteins and other natural products). Among topics selected for coverage are centrifugation, fast protein liquid chromatography, and apheresis. The project will terminate in December 2008. susato (talk) 17:02, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill Department of American Studies (Fall 2008)
Freshmen students in Professor Foster's course on American Indian Law, History, and Literature expanded, fact-checked, and created new Wiki content related to five major areas of American Indian law and history through small groups, each semester. Individuals in each group focused on particular sections under the major areas.

The areas of inquiry were: 1. Indian Country Jurisdiction 2. Supreme Court rulings on Native American Issues 3. Congressional legislation affecting Native Americans 4. Rights Reserved by Native American Tribes under the U.S. Constitution 5.  Native American Demographics, Social Statistics and Economic Data

A good example of our past projects is the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act from fall 2008 and Native American disease and epidemics from fall 2009.––Tolfoster (talk) 06:46, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

University of British Columbia (Fall 2008)
The University of British Columbia's class SPAN322 ("North of the Río Grande: Latin American Civilization and Culture") is contributing to Wikipedia during Fall 2008. Our collective goals are to bring a selection of articles on Chicano and Latino literature to featured article status (or as near as possible):


 * Chicano literature
 * Maria Ruiz de Burton
 * Who Would Have Thought It?
 * José Martí
 * Tomás Rivera
 * Sandra Cisneros
 * Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
 * Julia Alvarez
 * How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
 * Carmen Rodriguez

Please see our our project page. We welcome help and participation from other Wikipedia editors.

The project coordinator is User:jbmurray. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

University of Wisconsin-Madison (Fall 2008)
Students in the Hindu Law course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be editing a series of articles related to both Hindu law and Dharmaśāstra. The collaborative project will expand and improve these existing articles and create a number of new (sub-)articles that enhance the information on law, legal theory, legal institutions, and legal history in India, especially in connection to Hindu traditions. The goal is to provide good articles on important subtopics in these fields and to enhance the broader information on Hinduism and Comparative law.

The University of Texas at Dallas, Department of Geosciences (Fall 2008)
GEOS 4320 (The Physics and Chemistry of the Solid Earth) – An undergraduate class co-taught by Dr. Robert Stern and Dr. John Ferguson. Three separate groups will create or greatly expand articles on subjects relating to the class for a final project (due at the end of the semester). The pages are/will be:
 * Non-Volcanic Passive Margins
 * Volcanic Passive Margins
 * Earthscope

Oakland University Department of Art & Art History (Fall 2008)
Students in Professor Corso's courses, Art History 101:Introduction to Western Art and Art History 291: Concepts of Modern and Postmodern Art, will edit existing Wikipedia articles on Western art, paying attention to both Five Pillars and Strunk and White's guidelines in The Elements of Style. Further information will be posted shortly.

Anderson University (Fall 2008)
Anderson University (eBusiness) class has been assigned the project of adding meaningful and substantial information to the Wikipedia entry on Anderson University (Indiana) by Emmett Dulaney, Assistant Professor of Marketing Anderson University. The guideline they were given was that they could add nothing that could not be substantiated elsewhere, or that was not worthwhile (nothing trivial).

Savannah College of Art and Design (Spring 2008) (Ongoing)
In Spring 2008, students in Professor Lambin's undergraduate level Historic Preservation Law class took on the task of expanding on the Wiki content related to historic preservation law. There is a tremendous body of relevant historic preservation case law out there, but, for the non-practitioner, it can be challenging to find and interpret. It is hoped that these new expanded articles will make this information more readily accessible to preservationists. Students were able to choose from a range of pre-approved articles. Some students will create new articles, while others will expand on existing content such as articles on major pieces of historic preservation legislation, including the National Historic Preservation Act. This will be an on-going assignment and will take the place of the final research paper. In Winter 2009 it will take the place of the final research paper. To learn more or to provide comment, contact Professor Lambin in Talk. A list of completed articles is coming soon.

Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (Spring 2008) (Ongoing)
Professor Kristan Wheaton teaches an Intelligence Communications course twice yearly, part of which includes a publication assignment. In Spring 2008, he assigned a dozen students to contribute new articles on topics he preapproved in the areas of intelligence reform, analytical techniques, etc. He plans to continue these assignments in the future, having found the experience effective in teaching online collaboration, publication, and research skills. See Professor Wheaton's blog for a list of the articles and his feedback on the assignment. --Pat (talk) 02:25, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Lycoming College (Spring 2008)
In "The Rise of Islam" history course, students were asked to to augment short or stub Wikipedia articles on historic Islamic topics. Thirteen pairs of students worked on this project; each group chose a Wikipedia stub topic from a list provided by the course professor. Students worked to expand the articles to be as close to a Featured Article as possible. Students used the User:Lyco Hist 232 page to complete a series of exercises before beginning the assignment.

Virginia Tech (Spring 2008)
Students in a junior-level Forest Measurements class (FOR 3216) at Virginia Tech contributed 25 new articles to Wikipedia in Spring, 2008. The goal was to foster student learning about core concepts and tools used in forest measurements, and improve the dissemination of this knowledge to the general public through Wikipedia. A follow-up study showed that nearly 6000 page views were recorded for the student-generated articles in September, 2008. A report of the project is currently in review in the Journal of Forestry. Questions to pradtke (talk) 15:48, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Frostburg State University (Spring and Fall 2008)
Social Psychology (Spring 2008). Individual students created and edited 26 articles relevant to social psychology. Some articles were biographies of notable social psychologists. Students were required to reference outside authoritative sources for all additions or changes. Goals of the project was for students to critically examine sources, to learn about the ease of editing Wikipedia content, to experience the inherent fragility of Wikipedia content, and to experience presenting work in public.

Industrial/Organizational Psychology (Fall 2008). Individual students wrote papers that critically analyzed Wikipedia content articles by comparing factual assertions in articles to independent authoritative sources. Goals of the project was for students to critically analyze Wikipedia as a resource and to gain an appreciation for its credibility.

Course instructor: User:BalanceUT. These projects have ended.

University of Pittsburgh sociology (summer 2008)
SOC 0005 (Societies, an introductory course to sociology) will have about 8 groups, 5 student each, improving a sociology related article on Wikipedia, with the end goal of nominating it for a Good Article status. The course will last from late June to end of July. Course page: Wikipedia:School and university projects/User:Piotrus/Summer 2008. Course instructor: User:Piotrus. The project has ended. Results:

Group 1: stages of growth model from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Group 2: sexual script from no article to C-class: after

Group 3: military sociology from no article to C-class: after

Group 4: macrosociology from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Group 5: technophobia from stub to C-class: before, after, diffs

Students also have an option to gain extra credit from optional individual projects. Several have chosen to do so, see details in Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/User:Piotrus/Summer_2008, with good results (for example, the creation and expansion of sociology of film article).

Leeward Community College Upward Bound (summer 2008)
Instructor: Dayle Turner

English expository writing class (Eng 22: Introduction to Expository Writing) which had 9 students. Writing assignments for the class were all based on Wikipedia articles. The main assignment was to write an article for Wikipedia, using the rubric for Good article criteria. Topics were chosen from Requested articles and were approved by the instructor. Drafts of articles were revised and edited on individual userspace pages for each student. Drafts underwent peer and instructor review and editing before submission to Wikipedia mainspace. The course lasted from mid June to mid July. Course page: User:Eng22. Course blog.

To see the assignments and links to the articles students wrote for Wikipedia, see the Eng22 page for this course.

--Eng22 (talk) 06:53, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (March 2008)
The University of Sydney's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering will begin an undergraduate project in 2008.

Interdisciplinary and Wiki: A Match Made in Heaven (timeframe not specified)
Wikipedia is a very useful resource for teaching interdisciplinarity because it is inherently interdisciplinary. Wikipedia is similar to interdisciplinarity in how both require the contributions of many people from a wide variety of backgrounds in order to present a truly holistic view of any topic. No complete encyclopedia could be written exclusively from the point of view of any one discipline. For example, if Wikipedia were created only by scientists it would be missing important information about history and social issues. Similarly, students of interdisciplinary studies are taught that in order to fully understand real-world situations and issues, one must apply the methods and knowledge of multiple disciplines. In addition, actively working on Wikipedia teaches students how to write intelligently for a variety of audiences and how to work constructively with other editors. Such applied learning is more rewarding and more effective than traditional classroom teaching. It stimulates the students' desire to excel and their interest in what they are doing because they know that their work will be seen by others. The students are forced to think interdisciplinarily in order to contribute meaningful information to such a comprehensive project. Both Wikipedia and interdisciplinary thinking rely on links and connections between traditionally segregated fields. Every properly formatted Wikipedia article links to many others, allowing readers to discover ties between seemingly unrelated subjects. Similarly, interdisciplinarity often involves connecting aspects of different disciplines to form a new and unique area of study.

Commonwealth of Learning's Wikieducator (timeframe not specified)
Wikieducator is a community resource supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for the development of free educational content. COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:


 * planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
 * development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
 * work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
 * networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia (Spring 2008)
Professor Mara Scanlon is teaching a Long Poem seminar and her students have been working on a collaborative article in a stand alone MediaWiki to frame the history and significance of this poetic genre. As of April 1st, 2008, they created the Long poem Wikipedia article and are currently working on formatting it correctly, citations, and various other details. Jgroom (talk) 09:22, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Amherst College (Spring 2008)
Martha Saxton, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College incorporated Wikipedia into the curriculum of her Women’s History course (1865 to the present) in the Spring 2008 semester. Students participated in improving the gender balance of Wikipedia entries. Since students use Wikipedia as a source, it seemed valuable to work to understand it and improve it, both for the value of intervening with well researched and transparently documented articles, but also as a way to make the research, editing, and bibliographic processes through which scholarship is produced transparent to young historians.

In scrolling through various articles on Wikipedia it became clear that women show up only occasionally as subjects of biographies, and that they are barely integrated into the general historical articles like Early America. Fifteen students, enrolled in her Women’s History course, selected articles that they wished to revise to include the participation and contributions of women. In each case, students did an initial critique of the existing article, laying out what their own interventions would be. Two, for example, decided to work on the article on the Shakers and Mother Ann Lee. One student included material on women in the American Federation of Labor, and another worked on early labor activity. Others worked on topics as disparate as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the California Gold Rush and Social Security. They then worked up drafts of their proposed revisions. Those went through two or more rewrites for brevity, accuracy and balance. The students inserted their final revisions into the Wikipedia articles on May 15, 2008.

Two students from the Spring 2007 course on women in early America took this course as well. They collaborated on an essay describing their experiences of having their articles edited. They categorized the types of edits that occurred and looked into the motivation behind different kinds of interventions, exploring various kinds of biases, their intellectual results, and the implications for a balanced Wikipedia.

At the end of the semester, the students drafted a description of their project and its significance in beginning to create a balanced version of our nation's history. Working together, they produced a declaration outlining the need for the project and its methodology. The endeavor is called the Amherst College Gender Equality Project.

American University (Spring 2008)
Professor: Chris Simpson

This American University School of Communication project prepares graduate students to research, write, post, and edit carefully referenced new articles. We emphasize incremental contributions to existing Wikipedia articles on selected aspects of public affairs, followed by monitoring subsequent comments and edits. The course also discusses arguments found in Y. Benkler's Wealth of Networks that concern 'social production' and Wikipedia.

Columbus State University (Spring 2008)
Students in Developmental Biology are collaborating to create an article on Dictyostelium discoideum and its importance as a model system in developmental biology. The goals of the assignment are to create an article of value to the developmental biology community and to give students an opportunity to experience collaborative writing.

University of Hong Kong (Spring 2008)
For this Spring 2008 assignment, U21/HKU Human Security students (undergraduates) were asked to contribute substantive information on Human security to Wikipedia. The objective of this assignment was to contribute to the comprehensive and balanced coverage of Human Security on Wikipedia. The instructor LMCinHK started a Wikipedia article in 2006, entitled Human security, then provided students with specific parameters for how to edit/expand/cut that article. In order to improve the quality of their submissions, the students this semester will be doing their initial write-ups on a course wiki prior to submitting their work to Wikipedia. The course will end in mid May 2008.

Gloucester County College, Communications Dept.& Library (Spring 2008 & ongoing)
Offered as an alternate information literacy assignment in the spring 2008 semester in Christine Herz's English Composition class, the assignment was to create a new article or revise an existing article on Wikipedia. The course ends in May 2008. Some of the projects can be viewed from the class website.
 * COM101 Information Literacy Alternate Project: Wikipedia article

New Bulgarian University, History of Culture Department (Fall 2007/Spring 2008 and ongoing)

 * Head of the project: Mrs. Rossitsa Gicheva (User:Olympias), lecturer at NBU
 * Wikipedian support: User:Spiritia

Lecturers and students from the History of Culture Department at the New Bulgarian University initiated the "Arts and Culture" Wikiproject in Bulgarian-language Wikipedia. The project aims at the development and improvement of free encyclopedic content in these two fields of knowledge, with special emphasis on the ancient arts, philosophy, religion and culture which bloomed on the territories of Bulgaria and Greece. The team is using the Wikipedia project for written assignments during the courses in Ancient Religion, Ancient Greek Culture and Art, Thracian Culture and Art, Byzantine Art, Art of Medieval Bulgaria, Art of the Renaissance.

A month before the start of the project, a coordination meeting was held, during which basic aspects of Wikipedian philosophy and functioning were presented in front of the students. Participation in the project is voluntary and not limited to the students from the NBU. The project members also obtain technical support from other more experienced Wikipedians. Maintained are a list of the members, lists of red links to prospective new articles, stubs to be expanded, and lists of already written and edited articles and categories.

University of Karlsruhe, Institute for Geography and Geoecology (Spring 2008)
Graduate students in a geography class with Dr Christophe Neff "will analyse the content of wikipedia articles concerning the geography of southern France with special focus to Leucate, Corbières and (MTE) Mediterranean type ecosystems (and botanical articles concerning mediterranean plants). Furthermore they will compare the different wikis (en,fr, de, es etc.)". Splash - tk 13:37, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal (Spring 2008)
Virgilio A. P. Machado taught another offering of a course in logistics to mostly industrial engineering undergraduate students. Their assignment was to learn wiki and write articles related to logistics in the Portuguese Wikipedia. Two students from Greece registered for the course, so the project was also developed in the English Wikipedia. Project ended July 31, 2008.

vapmachado talk.cw 19:02, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Texas A&M University (Spring 2008)
Lecturer: Adrienne Brundage

Our Forensic Entomology course worked in groups to prepare and post articles relative to Forensic Entomology. Students were required to throughly research each subject before posting, then monitor comments and edits for a grade. Please direct any questions, comments or suggestions to me. I am hoping to make this a yearly project that evolves as the semesters progress.

This year's project went very well. While some students did drop the ball (as is common with any project given in a course), most of the students enjoyed the project immensely. The idea that they were writing for a very large audience drove them to put more work into the project than they would have otherwise (and thus complain about the amount of work they were putting in more than they would have otherwise). They also got to experience feedback in many forms from someone other than me. I think that may have been the greatest challenge and lesson they learned--not everyone will bend over backwards to spare their feelings, and they are unable to control what everyone says about their work. I also required that they take ALL feedback, good and bad, into account. This was tough for many, but it made them better writers.

Project Website Course Website

University of Pittsburgh (Spring 2008)
Students of Social Change in United States (with professor Salvatore Babones and teaching assistant Piotr Konieczny) will be using Wikipedia for written assignments with the aim of creating content related to 1) deindustrialization and Neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 22:35, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Assignment completed, the article diff before and after.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 19:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

University of British Columbia (Spring 2008)
The University of British Columbia's class SPAN312 ("Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation") contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. Our collective goals were to bring a selection of articles to "Featured" status (or as near as possible). In the end, we contributed three featured articles, seven good articles, and one B-class article:


 * Augusto Roa Bastos
 * Dictator novel
 * Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
 * El Señor Presidente
 * Facundo
 * Gabriel García Márquez
 * I, the Supreme
 * Latin American Boom
 * Mario Vargas Llosa
 * Miguel Ángel Asturias
 * The Feast of the Goat
 * The General in His Labyrinth

See also:


 * Murder, Madness, and Mayhem Project page.
 * "Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?". An essay by jbmurray.
 * "Interview with the team behind one of the 2,000th featured articles" Wikipedia Signpost 4.16 (April 14, 2008).

The project coordinator was User:Jbmurray. --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 17:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

University of Wisconsin-Madison (Spring 2007/Spring 2008)

 * Web Writing & Participatory Culture Spring 2008
 * Writing New Media Spring 2007

Instructor: Rik Hunter, graduate teaching assistant, English Department

Both composition courses were the English department's instance of the University's Communications B requirement -- English 201: Intermediate Composition. In these writing intensive courses students focused on the social, technical, and legal issues involved in the use of digital media technology in the production of new media texts and knowledge (e.g., appropriation, sampling, and intellectual property & copyright; fan production, collective intelligence; transmedia storytelling and contemporary mass media marketing techniques). They wrote extensively on blogs, wikis, and discussion boards; however, they also had the opportunity to compose multimodal texts. One of their goals was to consider how we define writing, in traditional print and new media. In addition, they conducted research on how people employ new media -- be it as individuals or collectives.

Goals for the Wikipedia project included:
 * learn the basics of wiki-markup syntax
 * create or add to a Wikipedia entry
 * juxtapose writing a researched encyclopedia article with writing an academic research paper
 * consider the strengths and weaknesses of writing in collaborative spaces
 * consider the strengths and weaknesses of wikis as sources of information
 * consider “objectivity” in relation to debates surrounding Wikipedia, Conservapedia, Citizendium
 * gain familiarity with Wikipedia community writing practices

In the Spring of 2007, students chose terms or concepts from the course readings, and in the Spring 2008 semester students could more freely self-select topics based on their personal interests and rationale for the creating the article (if one did not already exist) and why this topic was notable. Crowdsourced (talk) 00:14, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

The College of Idaho (Winter Session 2008)
Students in Professor Steven S. Maughan's history course, The Terror: Language, Radicalism, and Violence in the French Revolution, 1789-1799, will work to critique and improve biographical entries on notable French Revolutionary figures. Each will create her or his own Wikipedia login ID, will become familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource, and will refine and expand a biographical entry drawing on high-quality scholarly sources.

The assignments, based on templates provided for past Wikipedia course projects, will be completed by mid-Feb. 2008.


 * 

University of Toronto (Winter 2008)
Students in Danny Heap's Computers and Society course CSC 300 in the 2008 winter session are improving sets of Wikipedia articles pertaining to current course material dealing with how computers effect society. The main topics of this course to be handled are history of computers, ethics, professionalism, privacy, intellectual property, computers and work, the net, trust in cyberspace, censorship, and computers and development.

Interdisciplinary Studies
Scott Alberts, an associate professor of Statistics at Truman State University, is using Wikipedia for a project in his Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies course (IDS 175). The course examines the 'discipline,' of Interdisciplinary Studies, and the nature of what makes disciplines distinct. In addition, the class will examine topics through several interdisciplinary lenses, and try to look at them beyond disciplinary boundaries. Also, the students are forced to think interdisciplinarily in order to contribute meaningful information to such a comprehensive project. The class is also using contract grading in which students sign a contract saying exactly what grade they would like to receive and how much work they would like to do.

Wiki Labs
In Dr. Alberts' “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies” course there are six wiki-labs. Students of the course are required to complete Labs 0, 1, 2, and 3. Labs 4, 5, and 6 are an option for the contract grade. Students are asked to explore Wikipedia and find the shortest or most interesting path from “Death Star” to “Kevin Bacon,” and create a clever username for their account. By setting up their user page, students become more comfortable with using Wikipedia. Students add to their page the Truman State University userbox, and a Babel box. The final step to this project is to link the students’ page to Dr. Alberts’ Page and vice versa. The class must work together to work on 3 pages: the Truman State University page. Interdisciplinary page, and the contract grading page.
 * Lab 0: Welcome to Wiki
 * Lab 1: Set Up Yourself
 * Lab 2: Be Active; Get Busy; Don’t Hurt Yourself
 * Lab 3: Work Collaboratively
 * Lab 4: Write a Real Article
 * Lab 5 and 6: Focus. Choose one or more of: Make an article "good," join a Project, or work on reverse links or other special pages.

Barcelona University and Washington University in St. Louis (Fall 2007)
WikiProject History and Archaeology of Central Asia

As part of the courses History and Archaeology of Asia (256118) taught by Sebastian Stride the University of Barcelona, and Ancient Civilization of the Old World, taught by Michael Frachetti at the University of Washington Saint Louis.

Students are required to edit or write articles concerning the History and Archaeology of Central Asia.

Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and will work in collaboration with at least one other student, preferably from another university. Students will be expected to write or edit the articles in either catalan, french, english, italian, russian or spanish. Discussion will take place on the english language version of each article but will not necessarily be in english.

Supervisors: We, Michael Frachetti and Sebastian Stride will take care of introducing studends to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines. However, being ourselves novices, any help and suggestions are welcome!

Start date: The project begun in Fall 2007

Status: At that moment it has led to no editing other than that on the project pages. Please direct any comments to our user talk page or to the project talk page.

Technion - Graduate seminar on detection and estimation (Winter 2007-2008)
A graduate-level seminar on theory and applications of statistical signal processing, specifically detection and estimation theory, took place in the Technion in the winter 2008 semester (Jan.-Apr. 2008). Among other tasks, each student was assigned a topic for which there was no article in WP, or a short article needing a major rewrite. The student wrote a concise article (1-2 printed pages), which was reviewed by the course staff and then incorporated into WP by the student.


 * Course staff: Prof. Yonina Eldar and Zvika Ben-Haim. Zvika was responsible for WP-related aspects of the course.
 * Course website

Pages created/expanded:
 * Uniformly most powerful test created by User:LDB zen
 * Kernel smoother created by User:Anry11
 * Regret (decision theory) created by User:Dimarudoy
 * Bayes estimator substantially expanded by User:Assaftz
 * Chebyshev center created by User:Srouro
 * Invariant estimator created by User:Rajagiryes
 * Minimax estimator created by User:Slava3087
 * Redescending M-estimator created by User:Osnatgp
 * Location estimation in sensor networks created by User:Moshiko

University of Washington (Fall 2007)
Art History: Northern Baroque Art

The Northern Baroque Art class is undertaking the editing of the new article Marie de' Medici cycle, about a series of paintings commissioned of Peter Paul Rubens by Marie de' Medici for her home at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

Until November 9th, students will add entries to the article with complete references, as well as making edits to the article for readability and accuracy.

University of Western Australia (Semester 2, 2007)
Students in an undergraduate unit in Comparative Law were asked to create, and to review, a Wikipedia entry on an issue, concept or scholar in the field of comparative legal studies. Topics included European Civil Code, European Tort Law, Harmonisation of Law, Legal Culture, Burgerlijk Wetboek (Dutch Civil Code).

The exercise is discussed in a journal article by Normann Witzleb, the coordinator of the unit: Engaging with the World: Students of Comparative Law Write for Wikipedia (2009) 9 Legal Education Review 83 – 97. The article describes the rationale for adopting this research exercise, how it was integrated into the teaching and assessment structure of the unit, and how students responded to it.

Ohio University (2007)
Student teams from classes in Introduction to Sociology and Research Techniques are working to expand current articles in the Sociology WikiProject, and adding new pages on topics that are similarly basic to the discipline.

Students have created their own Wikipedia login IDs and have been encouraged to make some basic edits to their user page, to practice editing at the sandbox, and to familiarize themselves with wikipedia the resource, as well as Wikipedia the community.

Student groups are performing literature reviews, beginning with textbooks and review articles. For more depth we are working to identify the most appropriate primary texts, both books and peer reviewed journal articles. A major emphasis in this literature review and writing process to find at least two high quality sources that can provide templates for the overall discussion of a topic, and to flesh out that topic with published research from the field of sociology.


 * Course staff:  Professor Howard T. Welser; Htw3.

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Associate Prof. Andrew Collin's immunology class of 2007 are editing articles related to immunology. These edits have been outlined on an external wiki and are currently being moved to the English wikipedia. Contributers include user:Acute angle. The class's contributions were publicized in The Sydney Morning Herald in October 2007.

University of California, Davis (Fall 2007)
Phoebe Ayers worked with Dr. Ken Verosub to teach a freshman seminar on Wikipedia. Topics included an introduction to the site, policies and community, doing research, copyright and copyleft. One major assignment included comparing Wikipedia articles with the equivalent article in Encyclopedia Britannica, in the model of the Nature study. Send questions to phoebe: phoebe / (talk) 22:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC).

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey (Fall 2007)
An assignment was created by Davida Scharf, Director of Reference and Instruction at NJIT's Van Houten Library and tested in both online and face-to-face junior-level technical communication classes taught by Prof. Carol Johnson in the Fall of 2007. The basic assignment was to create a new topic or revise an existing topic on Wikipedia. Some results can be seen at the class website.

University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky Fall of 2007 and Fall of 2008
Associate Professor Dr. Tom Mueller teaches a course entitled Soil Use and Management. This semester, the students are working on a Project where they are required to make submissions to Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SoilMan2007 (talk • contribs) 19:15, 2 December 2007

The College of Idaho (Fall 2007)
Students in Professor Steven S. Maughan's history course, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, will work to critique and improve biographical entries on notable European historical figures. Each will create her or his own Wikipedia login ID, will become familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource, and will refine and expand a biographical entry drawing on high-quality scholarly sources.

The assignments, based on templates provided for past Wikipedia course projects, will be completed by Dec. 2007.


 * HIS 334: Wiki Biography Assignment

University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2007)
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman's class on Digital Citizenship is going to improve the article on digital divide. User:Piotrus is assisting.

The project has ended. While the article has not reached a GA level, it has been improved close to it (before after). Thanks to all who contributed (including of course many editors unaffiliated with the project!).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 12:48, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

ITESM Campus Toluca - Advanced B English Course (2007)
Leigh Thelmadatter's English as a foreign language class made contributions to the English and Spanish Wikipedia sites as the focus of an academic writing and cultural adaptation class. Students were encouranged to edit and create articles about their home country. In most cases, this country is Mexico; however, other Latin American countries are sometimes represented in the class. For this reason, students were required to work with the appropriate WikiProject for their country. This course was also the subject of a research project on the part of the teacher concerning "authentic" writing assignments and their value to very advanced EFL learners.

Pages that were contributed as final projects include Amecameca Cosmovitral Amboró National Park Plan of Tuxtepec Mexico 68 Mythology of MexicoChabelo Manuel AcuñaTenango del ValleIxtapan de la Sal Atlacomulco Amar te duele and San Mateo Atenco.

Thelmadatter 21:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

Oberlin College (Spring 2007)
Elizabeth Colantoni, a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Oberlin College, used Wikipedia in her undergraduate level course "The Eternal City: Ancient Rome Built, Imagined, and Remembered." Each student in the course evaluated a Wikipedia article about an ancient Roman monument as part of a research project. Articles were evaluated for accuracy, having up-to-date information, being too short or overly verbose, having useful and active links, references to print media, and whether it provided, on the whole, a good source for someone who wants to learn about the monument. Students were encouraged to edit the articles to improve any perceived short comings. If there was no article, students created a short article. Articles involved in the project had their talk pages tagged with an identifying template. The project concluded in May 2007.
 * "Oberlin College history class told to use controversial site", Cleveland Plain Dealer article

Northwestern University (Spring 2007)
Anise K. Strong, a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Northwestern University, made Wikipedia contribution a central part of her general Roman Civilization class of 115 students. Each student in the course edited or originated a Roman history "stub" article on Wikipedia, ranging from the province of Gallia Aquitania to the house of Julia Felix in Pompeii. Each article contained references to at least one primary source from the ancient world (including images), one encyclopedic source, and one scholarly book or article. Each student also evaluated and commented on two-three other related student-written articles on their discussion pages. The project concluded on May 18th, 2007. You can go to click here for the full list of articles.

University of East Anglia (Spring 2007)
Nicola Pratt, is using Wikipedia as an assessment tool in her Introduction to the Contemporary Politics of the Middle East, which is a Masters' level course in the School of Political, Social and International Studies. This is a pilot project, funded by the University of East Anglia as part of its teaching fellowships scheme. The project aims to improve the teaching and learning experience of Masters' level students. Engaging with Wikipedia should help to develop student awareness of the contested nature of knowledge production, as well as of rigour and balance in writing. As part of this project, students will be editing, on a weekly basis for eight weeks, Wikipedia articles related to issues in Middle East politics. The second part of the assessment is that students will write their own articles for Wikipedia. My challenge is to develop appropriate assessment criteria for grading their efforts.
 * "Students assessed with Wikipedia", BBC article

Brandeis University [](Spring 2007)
Dr. Liane Curtis, Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center [] taught “Women and Music, Past and Present: Style, Identity, Culture.”  Students each wrote five articles about historic (and a few contemporary) women composers. These articles include


 * Corona Schröter (1751-1802)
 * Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria (1724-1780)
 * Amélie-Julie Candeille (1767-1834)
 * Camilla de Rossi (fl. 1707-1710)
 * Marianne von Martines (1744-1812)
 * Francesca Lebrun (1756-1791)
 * Maria Hester Park (1760-1813)
 * Bettina von Arnim (1785-1759)
 * Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831)
 * Louise Bertin (1805-1877)
 * Josephine Lang (1815-1880)
 * Clara Kathleen Rogers (1844-1931)
 * Maude Valerie White (1855-1937)
 * Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860-1919)
 * Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867-1972)
 * Mary Howe (1882-1964)
 * Florence Price (1888-1953)
 * Morfydd Llwyn Owen (1891-1918)
 * Ruth Schonthal (1924-2006)
 * Ursula Mamlok (1928)

Expanding previous articles


 * Agathe Backer Grøndahl (1847-1907)
 * Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
 * Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
 * Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
 * Annea Lockwood (b. 1939)

University of Hong Kong (Spring 2007)
For this Spring 2007 assignment, U21/HKU Human Security students (undergraduates) were asked to contribute substantive information on Human security to Wikipedia. The objective of this assignment was to contribute to the comprehensive and balanced coverage of Human Security on Wikipedia. The instructor LMCinHK) started a Wikipedia article in 2006, entitled Human security, then provided students with specific parameters for how to expand that article.   Students are evaluated not only on their written contributions, but also on the effectiveness of their editing. The idea is for students to learn from the advice of their own teammates, but to also benefit from the editorial feedback of fellow Wikipedia contributors. The course ended in mid May 2007.

Cory Doctorow's USC COMM499 Class to Focus on Wikipedia Editing (2007)
Cory Doctorow's COMM499 course at had a project based on editing Wikipedia articles

According to Mr. Doctorow, "The assignment went very well. About 1/2 of the students REALLY got into it, making TONS of edits and really contributing. The key is to put every student's edits up for the whole class to see and discuss at each lecture." You can listen to the class podcasts at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/UscComm499Pwned

and hear them going over each student's edits at the start of class.

Amherst College (Spring 2007)
Martha Saxton, Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, incorporated Wikipedia into the curriculum of her Women’s History course in the Spring 2007 semester. While Wikipedia has been subject to criticism by some historians as a resource, it seemed timely to have students participate in improving the quality and scope of Wikipedia entries. Since students do use it as a source, it seemed valuable to work to understand it and improve it, both for the value of intervening with well-researched and transparently sourced articles, but also as a way to make the research, editing, and bibliographic processes through which scholarship is produced transparent.

One of Prof. Saxton's areas of research is women in pre-Civil War North America. In scrolling through various articles on Wikipedia it became clear that women show up only occasionally as subjects of biographies, and they are barely integrated into the general historical articles on Early America. Four students enrolled in her Women’s History course selected articles that they wished to revise to include the participation and contributions of women. Two decided to work on the article on Puritanism, another chose indentured servants, and a third chose to revise the section on the Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts. In each case, students did an initial critique of the existing article, laying out what their own interventions would be. They decided to limit those interventions to materials relating to women, as they had already read substantial material on early American women in the course and had a sound basis on which to do further research. They then worked up drafts of their proposed revisions, which went through two rewrites for brevity, accuracy, and balance. The students inserted their final revisions into the Wikipedia articles on April 3, 2007.

The final class project was to revise the article on the American Revolution along the same lines. Students had read a number of works on women’s experiences in the Revolution and divided up assignments among themselves to further research and cover the experiences and contributions by Whig women, Loyalist women, Native American women, and African American women.

Wayne State University (Winter 2007)
User:POL SLA 3750 WSU W2007 has the following text on his/her/their userpage: "Polish & Yugoslav Cinema Class at Wayne State University (WSU) Winter 2007 semester." The user is contributing to Polish/Yugoslav films. Possibly a class project of some kind. Course has ended according to the last edit on its talk page.

University of Minnesota (Spring 2007)
Twenty-three students in an introductory composition course at the University of Minnesota have written new articles (or significantly expanded stubs) on topics related to nature or the environment. A write-up of the project can be found at instructor's talk page. Students generated articles in their userspace, moving them over to the mainspace on April 27, where they edited the articles collaboratively in four-person groups. The project ended May 9.

School of applied arts Spilimbergo -Argentina (2007 to present)
Students of the course "Argentinean and Latinamerican History of Photography" wrote new articles about photographers of XIX century, working in Argentina and other countries of Latin America. The special interest regarding this contribution is that this specific topic lacks of good documentation and widely available sources (specially in 2007), since there are a few rare books hard to find, and much data is completely absent. Since the creation of the articles, some information previously inexistent on the web, has in this Wikipedia's articles a reliable source, indexing in the first places of search engines.

Articles created by students are:
 * Benito Panunzi
 * Christiano Junior
 * Esteban Gonnet
 * Esteban García
 * Antonio Pozzo

among others.

And also other articles on general topics of History of photography:
 * Francis Firth
 * Fotografía itinerante

University of Houston, Houston, TX – Mineralogy Project (Fall 2007)

 * Fall/ Winter 2007: pabstite, atheneite, lawsonite, tschermakite, covellite, moissanite, wadsleyite, afwillite, wollastonite, iddingsite, penroseite, scheelite, sperrylite, santabarbaraite, celsian, julgoldite, krutovite. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 11:09, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

MIT -- "Music 1900-1960" (Cuthbert) -- Music and Theater Arts (Fall 2006)
New articles and substantial expansions of articles on works and composers. Some modified or created articles include:
 * Three Places in New England
 * Knoxville: Summer of 1915
 * Mass in E flat Major (and Amy Beach)
 * Ballet mécanique
 * Composition for Four Instruments
 * Copland Piano Variations
 * Elegy for J.F.K.
 * Carl Ruggles
 * Chinaman, Laundryman
 * Piano Concerto No. 3 (Bartók)
 * Symphony No. 1 "Afro-American" (William Grant Still)
 * Rhapsody in Blue
 * Symphony of Psalms

Particular emphasis was placed on improving the use of music analysis in Wikipedia articles, which generally lags far behind what would be found in other music encyclopedias.

University of Iowa (2006)
Professor Marshall Poe of the history department at the University of Iowa is having his students in two classes use wikis for collaborative research and has assigned them the task of writing and editing Wikipedia entries related to class content. In both classes, the wiki software used is Confluence. Students have been asked to register with related WikiProjects (WikiProject Russian history and WikiProject World History). The classes will end in December, 2006.

University of Leiden, The Netherlands (2006)
Psychodynamic Perspective  Heuves Clinical psychology is “a field that is concerned with the application of psychological science to the assessment and treatment of mental disorders” (American Psychological Association, 1991). In clinical psychological research factors that are causally involved in the occurrence, maintenance, and treatment of mental disorders are studied. In evidence-based clinical practice this knowledge is applied in the treatment of different forms of psychopathology in various settings. The major aim of this MSc program is to provide students with a theoretical background for clinical psychology research, assessment and interventions. This includes the acquisition of knowledge and skills relevant to the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of psychopathology. Students acquire advanced research skills by participating in a clinical psychology research project. Completion of the MSc degree will prepare the student for subsequent academic degrees, including a PhD.The curriculum of the basic master program Clinical Psychology consists of a variety of courses and a master thesis. Psychodynamic Perspective This course provides the student with state-of-the-art knowledge of recent developments in psychodynamic theory. Presentations of key concepts in psychodynamic research and theory, such as: psychoanalysis and attachment, mentalization and object-relations, neurobiology of emotional development. Recent developments in psychodynamic assessment and treatment: Developmental Therapy, Transference Focused Psychotherapy and Mentalization Based Treatment. Students have a basic understanding of central concepts in psychodynamic theory. Students are able to search and evaluate psychodynamic databases. Students will write under supervision several entries for an internet encyclopedia. Since March 2006 students have added or edited to more than 20 entries in the field of psychoanalysis. The project is supervised by Dr Willem Heuves, assistant professor at Leiden University.

For more information please contact: Dr.Willem Heuves[heuves@fsw.leidenuniv.nl]

Penn State University (2006)
General--purpose wiki(s) for student--based class descriptions, student organizations, peer advising, and a number of other topics beneficial to the university. Gchriss 20:20, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Detailed at


 * This formal request has been declined by the University, and should not be confused with a seperate commercial venture titled "Penn State Wiki." My thoughts on the matter may be found in this letter.  The Pennsylvania State Undergraduate Student Government is now defunct, but the issue remains open for public consideration.  Thanks, GChriss &lt;always listening&gt;  &lt;c&gt; 01:21, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Cornell University (Fall 2006)
An end of term project for a senior level engineering course on downstream processing. Eleven students created or expanded articles on unit operations and equipment for production of purified biosynthetic pharmaceuticals and refined food ingredients. Warm-up assignments included creating a user page, editing text in an existing article, and adding a citation to an existing article. Students were assigned to review each others' work on the article discussion pages; the resulting public reviews were too brief and general. Markups in MS Word with changes tracked proved more useful. Some Wikipedia regulars visited the articles and left feedback, usually as summary tags - these were extremely useful. At this writing the project is likely to repeat next year, with additional warm-up exercises in image management (a major challenge), categorization, and citation. susato 23:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

University of Art and Design Helsinki - Media Lab Helsinki (Fall 2006)
In the first course exercise of the "Brief History of New Media" course students were asked to choose an article from the Wikipedia that was related to the theme of the course and improve it. Students made research and expanded the articles. The research and changes made to the Wikipedia article were also documented in another report that was delivered for the teachers.

The following articles were expanded:


 * Virtual museums
 * Sampling (music)
 * Virtual artifact
 * Algorithmic composition
 * Banner blindness
 * Video game, Computer game, Computer and video games
 * Iptv, Internet television

The exercise brief is online (PDF): http://mlab.uiah.fi/briefhistory/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/exercise1.pdf

The course blog: http://mlab.uiah.fi/briefhistory/

Yale University (Fall 2006)
Students in HIST 236, "History of Modern Science in Society", researched and wrote history of science-related articles for inclusion in Wikipedia. The following articles were either created or expanded:


 * Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA
 * Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
 * Embryo drawings
 * History of biotechnology
 * History of geology
 * History of model organisms
 * Nature (journal)
 * History of European research universities
 * Humboldtian science
 * Nature study
 * Positivism
 * Romanticism in science
 * X Club

I've also created a page of advice and instructions about using Wikipedia for humanities and social sciences writing assignments: User:Ragesoss/Assignments

Indiana University (Fall 2005-Summer 2006)
In two sections of CMCL C121, "Public Speaking", groups of 4-5 students will be given an article from Wikipedia which matches their team presentation topic. They will be asked to verify the information in the Wikipedia article using non-internet sources (that is sources which are not exclusively on the internet). They will then submit which bits they have been able to verify, not verify, or refute. The instructor is considering giving the students extra-credit for adding their references and/or correcting mistakes on wikipedia. If this is done, an introduction page will be created for the students explaining what they can do. In addition, I will list the relevant pages here for observation. --best, kevin • • • Kzollman | Talk • • • 02:57, September 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Now this is interesting. I look forward to seeing the students' work... assuming they don't mess up like the USouthFlorida crew. DS 23:54, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is always nice to see a serious projects. Who is the instructor? Perhaps some of my Pitt project (above) will be useful, I think major parts of it can be easily adapted to any related project. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 01:09, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comments. As promised here is the list of articles.  So far the students have just been assigned to research the articles.  The students were given a particular version so they wouldn't be researching a moving target.  We are still hammering out the details of how the extra-credit will work.  More to come...  --best, kevin  • • • Kzollman | Talk • • • 17:41, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Charlton Heston this version
 * Gun politics in the United States this version
 * Malcolm X this version
 * Susan B. Anthony this version
 * Women's Suffrage this version
 * Seneca Falls Convention this version
 * Declaration of Sentiments this version
 * Bill Cosby this version
 * Eleanor Roosevelt this version
 * Universal Declaration of Human Rights this version
 * Nelson Mandela this version
 * Clark Kerr this version
 * McCarthyism this version
 * Hi again. I have put the instructions for the students up at School and university projects/Indiana CMCL.  The students haven't been given the instructions yet, and any comments would be greatly appreciated!  I have all the pages on my watchlist and I check it more than once a day. --best, kevin  • • • Kzollman | Talk • • • 21:21, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Here are the edits that resulted from this project:, , , , , and . In general we believe it was a success.  The project will occur again next semester with similar articles.  --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 02:53, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

University of Pittsburgh (Summer 2006)
A Group Project about Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Disorders/Syndromes is being carried out by professor Ellen Cohn of the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. Feel free to direct any questions to User:Piotrus who is an assistant. The project will end by August, and should result in more then a dozen of new articles or improvements to existing one onthe above subjects.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 15:39, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
 * During the projects the following pages were created by the students:


 * Augmentation pharyngoplasty
 * Clefting prevalence in different cultures
 * Hearing loss with craniofacial syndromes
 * Obstructive sleep apnea following pharyngeal flap surgery
 * Speech characteristics in children with cleft palate
 * Velopharyngeal inadequacy
 * Vomer flap surgery
 * And the following pages were expanded:

--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus talk 22:12, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Ankyloglossia
 * Cleft palate
 * Craniofacial team
 * 22q11.2 deletion syndrome
 * Sleep apnea

St. Cloud State University (Spring 2006)
Matt Barton, an assistant professor of English at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, has decided to start a Rhetoric Portal in his rhetorical theory class. 

He previously assigned and coordinated the creation of the Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook. Liblamb 18:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

University of Hong Kong (Spring 2006)
For this Spring 2006 assignment, U21/HKU Human Security students (undergraduates) have been placed in teams to contribute substantive information on Human security to Wikipedia. The objective of this assignment (which comprises 25% of the final grade) is to create a comprehensive and balanced Human Security Wikipedia article. The instructor (LMCinHK) started a Wikipedia article entitled Human security then placed students in teams with specific parameters for how to expand that article. Each team is responsible for a different facet of human security on which to elaborate and students are evaluated not only on their written contributions, but also on the effectiveness of their editing. The idea is for students to learn from the advice of their own teammates, but to also benefit from the editorial feedback of fellow Wikipedia contributors. The course will end in mid May 2006.

Background information about the course and specific instructions given to students are reproduced on my user page  (although I have withheld the student names in order to protect their privacy.) My thanks to Piotr Konieczny / Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus and Kevin Zollman / kzollman who both kindly agreed to allow me to adopt some of their student instructions from their respective university project web pages located at  and . --LMCinHK 07:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

University of Tartu, Estonia (Spring 2006)
In Spring Term 2006, Professor Wolfgang Drechsler taught a seminar-style class on e-Governance: problems and issues (in English), in which the Wikipedia was a topic. The main written assignment was likewise a Wikipedia new article or change (preferrably about an e-Gov topic), according to the standards, which all students carried out. They were allowed to do so on the English, German, or Estonian wikipedia.

University of Maryland (Spring 2006)
Projects for Dr. Kent Norman's spring semester 2006 graduate course, Seminar in Human Performance Theory: Human/Computer Interaction, at the University of Maryland, College Park involved the creation of several articles:


 * Interface apparency
 * Spatial Visualization Ability
 * Construction Field Computing
 * Cosmobot
 * Universal usability

It should also be noted that as a joke, one of the students wrote an article on the Wroon, which was deleted as Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense after an article for deletion debate; see Articles for deletion/Wroon.

In another class, Thinking and Problem Solving, groups of 3-5 undergraduate students created five articles as team projects:


 * Plato's problem
 * Tip of the tongue
 * Mental chronometry
 * Interface metaphor
 * Functional fixedness

In preparation for writing the articles, all students performed a simple edit on some article of their own choice. In class, students discussed the pros and cons of writing articles on Wikipedia. A short report on lessons learned will be available at the Cognitron website. During fall 2006, these students were asked to complete online a brief follow-up questionnaire about the projects.

Harvard Extension School (Spring 2006)
For a class on the "history and aesthetics" of electronic music, students' final projects included "A substantial article, or series of edits, to Wikipedia on some aspect(s) of electronic music." The list of participants and contributions is coordinated at User:Electroclass.

University of California, Irvine (Winter 2006)
Jeffrey Barrett, Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, will allow students to write/rewrite two wikipedia articles in the areas of Philosophy of Science or Epistemology instead of writing a seminar paper in his graduate level "Epistemology of Science" class offered in the Winter term of 2006. I am auditing this class, and have offered to be a liaison for any students working on this project. At least two students have suggested interest. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 00:09, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I have created a welcome page for people in this class at School and university projects/UCI LPS. Please take a look at it and change it where needed. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 07:15, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Dartmouth et al (2005)
A group of Dartmouth undergraduates were recently encouraged to contribute new articles to Wikipedia. Some of the contributions were perfect; others were quickly listed on Votes for deletion (VfD, now Articles for deletion, AfD). More details can be found on WikiEN-l, and a subpage of the teacher's userpage.

Oregon State University (2005)

 * Oregon State University Technical Writing class used Wikipedia as a collaboration writing tool; the result is at Visual_literacy. Source of this information is a blog entry by Polvi:
 * Polvi, Alex. (2005). "Wikipedia in the Classroom". Retrieved Nov 1, 2005.

Chilwell School (Autumn 2006)
This was not so much a project as a different approach to a familiar problem - which exploits the multi language support available in Wikipedia. The problem was trying to teach technical subjects where a small number of students had no effective skills in the language the class was using. An approach that was tried was to "buddy" the student and then supply parallel work where one of the students was using the English page whilst the new student used their own language. They could type their work in their language. Students who were stuggling in most lessons could show off their ICT skills by creating work without being held back by language skills. The two students could collaborate and appreciate (albeit not read) each others work. Victuallers 14:05, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * references - Background and example (in this case ICT based) material is
 * Moved from Current Projects. Project concluded and sucessful.

University of Hong Kong (Fall 2005)
In what has become a project nearly every semester, Andrew Lih's (User:Fuzheado) class in new media is covering WTO topics, and has been editing the following articles:
 * 1990s_in_Hong_Kong
 * WTO
 * WTO Ministerial Conference of 2005
 * Tamar site
 * Southorn Playground
 * Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
 * Hong Kong People's Alliance on WTO
 * John Tsang, HK Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology
 * List of WTO Ministerial Conference of 2005 people

Project will be concluded on November 30, 2005.

Georgia Institute of Technology (Fall 2005)
Three classes of English 1101 spent a good portion of the semester drafting an entry on print culture for Wikipedia. Throughout the semester we've read a variety of texts on print culture and worked in small groups to draft versions of the article. We have posted an article and will be editing it. We will also be observing and discussing in class the edits other users make. You can see our drafting efforts at our test site using MediaWiki. We also used pbwiki to draft some of the article. Project will end sometime around 12/09/05.

Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (Fall 2005)
As part of BAI530, a Leadership course in the Bachelor of Applied Information Systems Technology program, students are required to participate in group community service projects of at least 10 hours of work. This semester (Fall 2005), five students opted to use those 10 hours contributing to Wikipedia. Some of the articles they contributed to include:
 * Northern Alberta Institute of Technology
 * West Edmonton Mall

University of Virginia (Fall 2005)
December 2005. Students in one section of an undergraduate (fourth-year) engineering thesis course have been asked to contribute a Wikipedia article (or expand an existing stub) on the expertise acquired in their major assignment this semester: writing an engineering research proposal. The proposal includes a literature review and rationale section, from which they can draw material suitable for a Wikipedia article.

They have been asked to read the available Help resources on creating good Wikipedia articles. Each has submitted a letter to me (the instructor) stating that they understand that they are licensing their work under the GFDL (those who did not wish to do so can submit the article to me instead of posting it). Comments welcome (use my user talk page). Bryan 21:24, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

The following articles have been posted (so far):
 * Computer go programming
 * Cyber security standards
 * Diffie-Hellman problem
 * GPGPU
 * Graphics pipeline
 * Insect flight
 * Lipid raft
 * Memory bound function
 * Metabolic network reconstruction and simulation
 * Needle removers
 * Neutron detection
 * Polygonal modeling
 * Rasterization
 * Vehicular communication systems


 * Here is a link to the assignment. Bryan 22:38, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

University of Vienna (2002, 2005)
See /Vienna 2002-2003 and /Vienna 2005-2006.

University of Washington (Seattle, Spring 2005)
Course Webpage

The undergraduate class Society and the Oceans (SMA/ENVIR/SIS 103) includes a project to make a Wikipedia contribution on the Puget Sound, Puget Sound environmental issues, South Maury Island environmental issues, the live food fish trade or the aquarium fish trade.
 * Update. The course appears to have ended in the first half of 2005. There is little activity on the related articles.

Teletraffic engineering (2005)
See Deletion_policy/Teletraffic_Engineering for discussion.
 * specifically, there are some issues about the quality and verifiability of the work submitted. The project appears to have been started around early 2005 and has ended by now, but some users are still cleaning up related articles as of summer 2005.

University of Georgia / Memento (Fall 2005)
An English class at the University of Georgia rewrote and added a lot of material to Memento (film). The article was expanded, but many of the class's contributions were original research and needed to be cleaned up. See Talk:Memento (film). Rhobite 21:57, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

University of Tokyo (Japan, 2004-2005)
First-year doctoral students in chemistry, as part of a course in academic English writing and presentation for nonnative speakers of English, prepared Wikipedia articles in their areas of expertise. Several times each semester, students drafted articles of about 200 words each and sent them by e-mail to the instructor, who corrected them. The drafts were then discussed in class, with the focus mainly on grammatical and other language issues. Later, the students uploaded their corrected articles to Wikipedia and notified the instructor by e-mail that they had done so, and he checked the articles one more time online and made additional editorial changes. Among the more than 100 articles that the students created or expanded were Beryllium oxide, Fluorescence resonance energy transfer, and Sonogashira coupling; a complete list appears on the instructor's user page.

ELP 127 (Summer 2004)
User:Kaisersanders has been teaching English to foreign business students, these being:

and appears to have finished around 30 July 2004.

Columbia University School of the Arts (New York City, Fall 2004)
Open Source Culture: Intellectual Property, Technology, and the Arts is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered in fall 2004 at the Columbia University School of the Arts. For more information on this project, see School and university projects/Open Source Culture.
 * Update. The course appears to have ended in the 2004. There are no edits since December 2004.

Bad Mergentheim Business School (Spring 2004)
International Management Class: We studied Customer Experience Management (CEM), a new marketing concept in our class and as an outcome of this, all 19 students shared their insights into CEM at Wikipedia, so others can quickly get into CEM as well. We hope that our texts are easy to understand and do welcome any changes or further contributions.

The results can be found at: Customer Experience Management (CEM)

As one contributor to another, (and without anywhere else to write this) can I encourage the students in this project to create a login, so that there is somewhere than we can provide helpful feedback and advice on this project. DJ Clayworth 16:30, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Update. The course appears to have ended in the 2004. There are very few 2005 edits so far.

Norwegian School of Management (Norway, spring 2004, continuing)

 * Course page, GRA6821 Technology Strategy

I am tasking the students to create an account for themselves, edit some pages (in the English or Norwegian version of Wikipedia,) and reflect on their experience. The English assignment page is at User:Espen/gra6821 (there is also one in the Norwegian version. The list of participating students (created by the students themselves) is at User:Espen/gra6821/stud6821 (as well as in the Norwegian version.)  The students are Master level business school students, the course title is Technology Strategy and Strategic Technology, and the topic for the lecture and assignment is collaborative software.  I will underscore the importance of Wikipedia culture, NPOV, and so on, and use the experience to drive a discussion about what makes collaborative software work (or not.) Espen 11:48, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)
 * Update. The course appears to have ended in the first half of 2005. There is little activity on the related articles.
 * Update again - this assignment has been run in a number of classes, both in the English and Norwegian versions of Wikipedia. Mixed results - not many pages added by students, more in the Norwegian than the English version, but some students take off and become contributors, and all learn how to edit. Espen 21:01, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

University of Hong Kong (2003 - 2004)
14 July 2003: User:Fuzheado "teaches at the University of Hong Kong and is using Wikipedia to help teach his normally very structured students a lesson about the chaos and joy of collaborative editing." Several numerical accounts have been created for the students. The class at the Journalism and Media Studies Center is called You've Got Mail: Interactive Media, News and Communication ''Designed for advanced undergraduates, the course examines the interactive technologies that are increasingly influencing the way people communicate, share news and create relationships. The course will look at how and why people are using interactive games, Kazaa’s peer-to-peer technology, web cameras, chat rooms, talking avatars, wireless and other technologies. It will also challenge students to assess the usefulness of new technologies and forecast how they will impact society and different cultures.''  Students have been broken into groups of roughly seven people each, and asked to contribute to a specific topic related to Hong Kong or Chinese culture. The topics include: Lamma Island, Dim sum, Mongkok, Chinese tea culture, Chinese white dolphin, MTR, Beaches of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Tramways, Victoria Peak, Ecology of Hong Kong, Education of Hong Kong, Newspapers of Hong Kong, Apple Daily.

There may be a tendency for Wikipedians to keep their "hands-off" these sections as they're being produced by students. Please don't! Preserve the dynamic of Wikipedia - keep your hands in it, and treat them as any other Wikipedians. Part of the experience is to work with strangers to collaboratively edit, each person pitching in what experience they have -- grammar, editing, rewording, links, context, statistics, etc.

UPDATE: CNN International Tech Watch aired a segment this morning on the Wikipedia and our student project. See CNN TechWatch videos (UPDATED link on Vimeo) for a streaming video of the segment. -- Fuzheado 05:35, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * October 2003 JMSC0101, the project was repeated with topics related to Media in Hong Kong, and this list in particular. Fuzheado


 * Spring 2004, FOSS0001: Media in Contemporary China, will be using Wikipedia to create articles on some media organizations in China, such as: China Youth Daily (newspaper), Caijing (magazine), News Probe aka Xinwen Diaocha (a news programme of China Central Television), Sina.com (web)


 * Spring 2004, YJMS0001: You've Got Mail, is using it to create articles at: User:YJMS0001/assignments


 * September-October 2004, JMSC0101 project was repeated with Chinese journalists as the topic. See User:Fuzheado/jmsc0101, run by User:Lfcho

University Saarland (Germany, 2003-2004)
Institute for Information Science

Materials that were generated during the German course Knowledge Representation and Information Retrieval WS2003/2004 were integrated in de.wikipedia by the lecturer and (hopefully) the students. Details about the articles can be found on the course-page and on.

Portland State University (Spring 2003)
Spring 2003: Bart Massey taught another offering of his ongoing combinatorial search class. His difficulty in finding an acceptable course textbook after a number of years of trying led to the idea of having students create content on Wikipedia that reflected the course materials, for future use.

The experiment was a mixed success. Some useful Wiki pages were created (e.g. combinatorial search, constraint-satisfaction problem). Some other pages were edited to reflect new content (e.g. best-first search). While Bart was not aware of this page or its guidelines at the time, he believes that they were mostly followed. In particular, he tried to edit all the inserted material for content and style (although failing somewhat at the latter).

Ultimately, much of the material collected was created offline on the course Wiki and elsewhere, and has never been incorporated into Wikipedia. This is a shame: if some other Wikipedian wanted to assist with this, that would be great. Otherwise, Bart will get around to it sometime before the next course offering: the project is currently moribund.

(For what it is worth, Bart agrees with the comments of Fuzheado above: Wikipedians, please do not be shy about helping clean up these pages. They could still use editing and addition.)

External link: Bart's PSU CS 443/543 Combinatorial Search course page.