From KALW Radio
Colleges take a chance on Wikipedia
By Nicole Jones
A couple of years ago an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, named Brian Carver, was doing an Internet search for his cyber law course on the Stored Communications Act. It’s an act that regulates how the government can use personal Internet data.
BRIAN CARVER: And one of the first hits was the Wikipedia article and so I followed it and as I poked around a bit, I realized that Wikipedia did not have a stand-alone article on the Stored Communications Act and I thought, “Well, it ought to. This is an important act.” So then I thought, “Well Brian, you should fix that.”
Not him, exactly. In the spring of 2009 he put his students to work on it. It was a risk. There were almost no experienced Wikipedia editors in the class. But in the end, Carver says his students added to the coverage of legal topics in Wikipedia – and got a grade for it.
CARVER: One of my favorite comments that a student made is that this was the first paper he’d ever written that wouldn’t end up in his professor’s recycling bin....