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Comment by lolcraft | Hacker News Reader

The submission is great, but "Professor tells 1700 students to fill Wikipedia with plagiarism" is a bad title. The professor didn't tell those students to plagiarize. A better title would be something like "Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate".

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Yeah, the official title on Wikipedia (or at present is) "Class of 1700 students fill Wikipedia with plagiarism. Response from prof is accusation of illegal behaviour by editors" link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...

If you read through the information, the story appears to be : prof assigned wiki edits to class, wiki find the class do more harm than good and ask prof to stop, prof does it again the next year anyway.

Basically this is a 'friends don't let friends assign their students wikipedia editing'!

Thanks, this summary was extremely helpful since I didn't want to read the gigantic wall of text in OP and the title, no matter how I tried to parse it, didn't give me enough information!

Except that still implies that 1445 students plagiarized. "Professor tells class to edit wikipedia, results in 16 cases of plagiarism" would be way less misleading.

One wonders why 'elect_engineer' created an account only to submit it with that title.

Because I am one of the Elect of course!

Seriously tho created an account because I never had anything to post to Hacker News before and for the title I just copied the title on the Wikipedia page and cut it down to eighty characters as required by hacker news

Here is a previous assignment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/A_large_scale_studen...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...

Here is the 2013 assignment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WoodSnake

I can't find anything like the original title in any of those links.

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