Roger Ebert's Wikipedia
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
B. I've always thought it'd be a great thing for university classes to have, as a weekly assignment or final project, for each student to choose a Wiki page and actively edit it, whether it's to add actual content, improve the writing quality, or to restructure and reorganize the page and its priorities.
Hopefully, in practice, once a student starts putting work into a page, they will face resistance from the page's traditional editors. And that's when the fun begins: the students would learn from the give-and-take of the collaborative editing process, as well as getting a great deal of editing experience, period...and if the student is halfway-apt, the debates over significance/sourcing/structure would compel the student to do even more research on the topic...in fact, that's why I stay away from Wikipedia editing, because I end up spending hours doing research and fact-finding, even for trivial things...it's character building, but bad for the work schedule :).
The whole thing is also a lesson about the Internet community and dynamic...which, sure, you could learn by spending a semester on Reddit...on the other hand, at the end of the Wikipedia assignment, both the student and the world more directly benefits from the product of the student's labor: a better Wikipedia page.
And it definitely helps to coordinate them through that page. Otherwise, active editors tend to just say "GAAAH why are all these new users suddenly editing on similar topics and not following the style guide at all," and sometimes they conclude it's some sort of coordinated manipulation and start reverting en masse, which is never a good thing to happen to a school assignment.
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/using-wikiped...
and
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/follow-up-to-...
Would be hard in practice to mark. Perhaps the student could submit what they would like the page to look like, and the lecturer could just mark that. Putting even part of a student's mark in the hands of often irrational Wikipedia editors seems unreasonable.
And as a precautionary measure, there is always "File, Save Page As".
Generally when people start these courses they just notify everyone ahead of time, get advice from wikipedians, make sure the students are adequately sourcing and documenting their process, etc. You tend to have these conflict issues when a student goes into an article and dumps a whole bunch of changes of varying quality in there at once, then doesn't know where to go to find sympathetic editors who can sort out relevant quality and policy concerns from basic territorial behavior.
Being able to work around such problems (often it is a matter of carefully controlling your tone & presentation, including being aware that the person on the other end knows nothing about you and has no body language cues to gauge your behaviour from so you have to be more careful to be very clear in your intent than you would in real life) and find the common ground needed to cooperate is a very useful life skill.
There's some advice to help implement successful Wiki-assignments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Student_assignments
As much as their rules have resulted in the output of a wonderful source of knowledge, it is far from unquestioningly perfect. The worst problem I see is the need for a single consensus on a page. I would prefer, if there was a controversy in a page's community, to split into multiple pages each representing the topic from a clear viewpoint instead of a single page of watered-down groupthink.
Does this exist? If not, anyone else interested?
A very common arrangement is that the photographer retains copyright, and the subject gets only a right to use the photographs, not copyright ownership. Therefore the subject can't release the photograph under a CC license, because they aren't the copyright holder. In some cases the subject/purchaser has bought only noncommercial rights, not commercial-use rights (as in this case, where the photographer retained commercial-use rights, which he subsequently sold to Getty Images). In very traditional arrangements the subject doesn't even have reproduction rights: they have to order more prints from the photographer if they want more copies. All they own in that case is the physical copies they've bought from the photographer!
The short of it is: if you want to own the copyright on photos you pay someone to take, make sure you get a copyright assignment in writing. It is getting more common for photographers to agree to do that. Incidentally this is good practice for software contract work as well: the contract should clearly specify who owns the copyright on any software produced.