Wikipedia:School and university projects/University of Maryland

This project, begun in Fall 2009 and ongoing, involves students in an upper-level course in history of technology. Students begin by critiquing existing Wikipedia articles on a history of technology topic and sharing their critique with other students. This prepares the student to then choose a topic that does not yet appear on Wikipedia or is represented by an article that can be measurably improved. For complicated topics, students are encouraged to choose a sub-topic that they can manage with a few weeks of library research. An article is then drafted, critiqued by another student, and then posted to Wikipedia to get community reaction. The results have ranged from poorly constructed articles that last only a few hours on Wikipedia to articles that become the basis for long-term encyclopedia entries.