Trading the Bachelor’s thesis for … Wikipedia

Typically, university students are warned to avoid citing Wikipedia in essays.

However, a few particularly forward-looking universities in Poland and Ukraine are urging their students to write articles for Wikipedia, rather than employing Wikipedia quotes for essays that would probably just ‘gather dust’ once they’ve been graded, according to the Global Post.

Poznan University of Medical Sciences in western Poland is hoping to do away with the Bachelor’s thesis, preferring to encourage students to instead post Wikipedia articles. Poznan joins four other universities already working in co-operation with the Wikipedia Education Program.

 

 

An advanced editing workshop at Wikipedia, via Sage Ross, Wikimedia Commons

The Wikipedia Education Program began in 2010 as a grant-funded project in association with the Wikimedia Foundation. So far four universities are involved, in the United States, Brazil, Canada and Egypt and have produced almost 6,000 articles.  Through cooperation with Wikimedia, university academics who wish to use Wikipedia as part of their courses are supported and are provided with ‘campus ambassadors’ who are trained in editing Wikipedia articles.

English Wikipedia currently has 748 million pages, but the Polish Wikipedia only has a fraction at 18 million at present, coming in eight largest in the world.