Very interesting idea from the Wikipedia 2006 conference:

Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, recommended that professors require students to create or edit Wikipedia articles as a classroom exercise. By turning students into Wikipedia editors, he argued, professors could encourage collaborative scholarship and alleviate the tedium of solitary paper-writing.

The professors might also be doing the Web site a favor, Mr. Konieczny said: "Perhaps having students all around the world contribute to Wikipedia is what we need to sustain its exponential growth."

The danger in assigning wiki editing is that wiki software is almost infinitely flexible (especially MediaWiki, the backbone of Wikipedia). One semester I installed MediaWiki on my own domain and set my students to it, unaware that they could create a whole host of orphan pages they could never find again.

I'd suggest that if you try this, you assign a specific page to a student. You might also suggest that they edit the discussion side (Talk) before making major changes or explaining the major changes. Part of the process is the community, and if someone comes in out of the blue and dramatically rewrites an existing entry without explaining the changes or asking about them, someone might well come back and reverse the changes.

I had a student in ENG 101 write a fine piece on Native American basketmaking for a process essay. He'd actually written not any kind of process but instructions, which I hate, but I said if he would post it on Wikipedia, which had almost nothing on the topic and certainly nothing as expert as his piece, I'd cut him a side-deal and take it. He was enthusiastic, but it was the Friday before Spring vacation, and he didn't come back to school after break to make the post.

John...what is a "process essay?"

Oh, that's a fascinating idea--I was just looking at my old syllabus for a grad seminar on (mostly) women's fiction of the 1790s, and thinking that the already near-obsolete Courseworks software was so offputting that it was hardly worth doing the old collaborative annotated bibliography thing I had before. I experimented (I am lazy about the tech) with a blogspot blog for another grad seminar, and it had its moments, but wasn't quite suited. But this is really interesting--I could work out a list of topics/books/authors to dole out and the students' work would actually have some real-world utility, which is why I'm sometimes reluctant to assign them time-consuming tasks that are not overwhelmingly intellectual (i.e. the short miscellaneous assignments rather than the seminar paper, which I still feel is a worthwhile exercise).... Hmmm....

Just one comment:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902

What is a process essay? Good question, I sure as heck had no idea until I began teaching ENG 101....