Featured content from schools and universities
Two university projects in short succession have shown strikingly different outcomes with respect to the relationship between Wikipedia and educational institutions. As reported in the April 14 edition of the Signpost, the Murder, Madness, and Mayhem project produced three featured articles and eight good articles over the course of a college semester. These included the very first example of featured content created as part of an educational assignment—an article on the Guatemalan novel El Señor Presidente—which was displayed on the main page on 5 May.
By contrast, the past few days have seen a rather less successful attempt to integrate Wikipedia into the college curriculum: as discussed at length at the Administrators’ noticeboard, a professor teaching a class in Global Economics asked his students to upload their essays to the encyclopedia, but these have in the main been swiftly deleted, merged, or redirected. Of 70 newly created articles, about half were deleted, many were merged or redirected, only seven have survived in anything like their original form, and only one (Organ trade) is free of cleanup tags. The question is whether future projects can be more like Murder, Madness and Mayhem, and avoid the mistakes of the Global Economics foray.