From the Projects: 2,000th Featured English Wikipedia Article

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El Señor Presidente is the 2,000th featured article on the English Wikipedia. Featured articles are considered the best Wikipedia has to offer, and are selected through a collaborative peer review and editing process, coordinated on a page called “Featured Article Candidates”, under application of the featured article criteria. From the article:

El Señor Presidente (The President) is a 1946 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias also makes early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author’s home town.

This article is particularly interesting in that it has largely been developed as part of a university project by professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who asked his student to write Wikipedia articles as a course assignment. Wikinews has a fascinating interview with Beasley-Murray and two participating students.
Erik Moeller, Deputy Director<

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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A good example of how universities can integrate Wikipedia into their classes. Think, if every law school, med school, undergraduate college, and high school in the US (let alone the world) were to work on just 1 featured article per semester (so 2-3 per year). We’d have thousands of new FA’s coming every year on topics all over the spectrum.

Dan, that would be more fun than the final paper I think. :)_

Lots of schools are trying to do this, but they just don’t know how. It’s pretty hard to get an FA after only a few months of Wikipedia experience unless you have someone helping.

You are completely right, Dan. Schools and universities are often untapped resources that we and many other organizations should really look into working with more often. This reminds me of another untapped potential: senior citizens. 🙂 However, that’s for another discussion. 😛

When approached about doing the Wikinews interview, professor Beasley-Murray was most receptive to the idea. The good news hidden in a quite lengthy article is that he’ll be doing this again. He admits that the undertaking took more of his time than other, more conventional, teaching/assessment methods but the standard of work was higher. The class was divided into teams for the project and 40% of the mark was on this, with the end of term paper dropped so students could focus on Wikipedia. There are rumours that getting your pet article to Featured was an automatic A+ on the… Read more »