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In March, I sent a "call to action" on Wikipedia.?In doing this, I had two goals: 1) to raise awareness regarding the number of readers using the service, and 2) to encourage the subject experts (you!) to get involved in fixing the many inaccuracies to be found there.?The initial response was what I expected, with a number of edits being made to the pages I indicated by new members immediately after I sent my note.?But there is still a great deal to be done.?So now, by way of a follow-up, I would like to offer a proposal for debate; something tangible that -- by taking advantage of the thinking behind the Wiki concept (i.e., the democratization of production) -- might make an actual, sustainable difference. For those of you out there preparing new course syllabi, or revising old ones, an interesting assignment for your students may be to find -- and correct -- an error on any of the Wikipedia entries listed below.?(These are the same ones I mentioned in March, but with updated traffic stats.) Assessment could then be of a report to be handed in, written in the normal way (i.e., without using Wikipedia or requiring any other new-fangled technologies). The first part of this report, in the style of a peer review, would critique the contents of a particular Wiki page having relevance to the material covered in your course.?The second part would narrow in on a particular error, exaggeration, or omission contained therein.?The third part would be to explain why this is problematic and, with reference to primary source texts, explain how it could be remedied.?The fourth part would then be to make the changes, detailing in the report what was changed and where.?And the final part would explain how the community reacted to the corrections, as well as why they reacted in that way. Aside from improving the quality of the Wikipedia pages, and thereby addressing the explicit need I outlined in March, the pedagogical benefits of this effort would seem to be numerous.?To put it in a single (Piaget-style) sentence: students would learn to contribute to scholarship and critique the writing of others in an environment where non-experts are known to contribute the bulk of the content, while basing their criticisms on a proper review of the literature.?Since the original contributions which they find problematic could easily have come from one of their peers, using a possibly questionable source, they would be encouraged to think reflexively about the quality of their own scholarly efforts.?This increased awareness would then (hopefully) generalize to their other writings, while at the same time increasing comfort and fluency in an important new medium. Of course, this is all still fairly abstract.?If there are general thoughts that would be of interest to the list as a whole, I'm sure they would be welcome.?But if anyone is interested in developing this assignment for use in their own course, and wants to talk specifics, please email me offlist (jtburman@yorku.ca). As for the rest of you, please enjoy -- and be shocked by -- the latest traffic report on Wikipedia pages of our mutual interest. Jeremy

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