The third grade at one of my schools is just completing a project designed to help them understand the debate over quality of information on Wikipedia. They wrote student reports on an individual ancient Egyptian god or goddess. We then took them into Simple English Wikipedia--intended for younger/ESL students--and taught them how to select information appropriate to Wikipedia (no opinions, etc.), and how to input/edit Wikipedia. Now, other people are editing their contributions (which, of course, each of these thrid graders *knows* to be true and completely correct exactly as s/he wrote it). New, interesting information is being added. Their own "perfect" information is being corrected. Their articles are being marked as needing better citation, in some cases. Sometimes, edits even stimulate automated responses from Wikipedia bots, which are then followed up/corrected by human editors. They are truly getting a look at what makes a wiki article happen.
At the same time, they feel proud of using their knowledge to shape a resrouce known round the world.
I am writing, in part, to invite any classes doing work on these same gods and goddesses to join in and edit these articles to help drive the lesson home. The articles are still pretty young and short, which means there are lots of clear opportunities for students to watch their contributions change over time. You can find the deities we have covered here: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Egyptian_gods_and_goddesses. Our inputs are also still in progress, by the way, so your students should also see changes to their additions.
If Egypt is not in your lesson plans, Simple English Wikipedia is pretty lightly populated, and can be used in this manner on most topics.
Thank you to Alan November for suggesting a similar activity in the first place.
Just found this "plain English" video explaining the basics of Wikipedia to use with students: http://www.commoncraft.com/wikipedia-video
Posted by: Tasha Bergson-Michelson | 05/26/2010 at 08:57 AM