Last year the students in the Tectonics course I TAed were assigned the task of repairing geology and tectonics related Wikipedia articles. Students had to select a Wikipedia article with sparse or incorrect information, research the topic, and submit an improved version of the article for review. The TA then reviewed the new article version and only after the students submitted revisions was the article approved for publication on Wikipedia. Here are the issues students tackled last year:
- The Alice Springs Orogeny
- The Highland Boundary Fault
- Episodic tremor and slip
- Mantle Wedge
- Ophiolites
- Seismic tomography
- The Ryukyu Trench
- Slab pull
- Cocos Plate
- Scotia Plate
- Megathrust earthquake
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UPDATE
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Something may be wrong with the comments on this blog. Feel free to send me a message with your comment and I’ll add it to the post.
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Comment from Matt Hall of AgileGeoscience:
I finally got around to reading this after a lot of travel. It’s terrific — I’m so glad to read about the exercise and its outcomes, so thanks for reporting.
While I definitely don’t want to discourage people from building up their own ‘to do’ lists in Wikipedia, I did want to point to one other resource for finding articles that need work (you already mentioned the stubs lists at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geology_stubs.
WikiProjects try to consolidate efforts on certain topics. WikiProject Geology maintains a list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology/Assessment) of high priority articles that need work (it takes a minute to parse the colourful table), and also a To Do list of tasks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology/Tasks). These can be good places to look for inspiration.
Cheers! Matt
Thanks for the links, Matt! I’ve passed them on to our students.