An Unexpected Issue [orichalcum]

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So, my students created the roughdraft of their Wikipedia articles last Friday and sent the links to me and to three fellow students for review. The student comments are due tomorrow, and the final version is due Friday. This seemed fairly straightforward.

However, Wikipedia does not, of course, exist in a vacuum. A number of random Internet people have been editing and revising my students' articles, which I thought would go largely ignored for a week since, after all, they are on rather obscure topics like Babatha and L. Caecilius Iucundus. So the question becomes, how do I grade fairly given those revisions? My current plan is to check the history links, but that will be cumbersome and take much longer than expected. I could just give them credit for creating the article.

All in all, it's a good thing, but rather inconvenient at the moment.

Mood::

pleased

Music:: 4400 Season 3

location: Evanston

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There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

The original article exist in the history, of course. In fact, the edits afterwards are doing some of the grading for you, right?

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ditto jen!
browsing the history is quite easy. You just go to the original page, and it will be as if never edited. :)

The only trouble would be if the wikipedians think the article is worthless and delete it.

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Yeah, what they said. You'll have to find the correct drafts, but you can ask your students to tell you which pages in the history to consult for grading their submissions, perhaps?

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Yes,that's a good idea-- have them link you to the original page's URL in the history instead of the main page.

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So, the only problem is that they are supposed to be revising this week based on their reviewers' comments, which I may not have made clear. So there's the original page, and the final page, but figuring out which changes were made because of student input and which by Random Dudes is a bit more complex, though certainly not impossible.

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No ideas on the Wikipedia thing - but, dude, 4400 Season 3 is out? Top of the queue!

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And the first episode is incredibly good and really upsetting - don't watch when depressed.

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Uh-oh. Duly warned!

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Probably the best you can do at this point is to have the students submit a hardcopy of whatever they would like to count as their "final revised" version and weigh that version as the majority of the grade. They can try to edit the pages on the live wiki and give you a time-stamped revision to grade, but you could get some disgruntled wiki editors on your hands if your students start reverting changes outsiders have made because their student comments told them to do so.

Grading the "rough" drafts is just going to be a mess unless you gave them specific instructions not to post anything until they were ready to call that their first graded draft. Some students may have posted works in progress in good faith (i.e. not realizing that ANY new page comes up on a "recently added/changed" page search) and therefore (inadvertently or otherwise) have gotten more outside input than their peers.

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orichalcum

An Unexpected Issue

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