UK students help Wikipedia with makeover

If there’s one thing you know about writing a paper for class, it’s that you don’t use Wikipedia as a source.
 
UK students are helping the website become more of a learning tool.
Students in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at UK are helping to give Wikipedia a U.S. public policy makeover, according to a news release by UKNow.
Martin School professor Eugenia Toma’s Economics in Public Policy course, along with 21 other public policy classes around the country, are improving the free encyclopedia’s content on public policy. This includes updating basic definitions, which was how the class began. Currently, students are working on a project to demonstrate externality, one of the arguments for government intervention in private markets, in everyday life.
“Wikipedia entries really make them think more deeply about the topics we’re discussing. They have to present these concepts to the world,” Toma said in the news release. The Wikipedia articles are part of the students’ final grades.
Wikimedia, the nonprofit foundation behind Wikipedia, began the Public Policy initiative to work with professors at public policy schools to improve the content of the English language Wikipedia, from stubs to completely new articles. Toma said she was surprised that there were topics to make better.
LiAnna Davis, representative of the Public Policy Initiative, said Wikipedia wants to expand into classrooms.
This means applying the concept of editing Wikipedia articles in other classes. Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, said in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that “what we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.”
So while you might want to steer clear of using it as the basis of that 15-page paper, Wikipedia is taking tentative steps into the classroom.