Rather than the common approach in academia of putting down Wikipedia for not being a reliable source for students writing papers and reports, professor Martha Groom decided to turn that notion on its head by making fixing (or correcting) the Wikipedia article the actual assignment.
Not only does this creative approach directly address the complaints of inaccuracy by contributing to the system instead of ignoring it, it had an interesting side effect on the quality of the students’ work as well.
For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was “transformative,” and students’ writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.
Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor’s eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer “Wikipedians” who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.
The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.
In other words, the students did better work than they otherwise would have, and they were helping out other people as well, by contributing their research and writing time, finding and citing sources, etc.