This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Among the many items past students written on are:
Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.
Jennifer Malkowski, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Smith College, assigned her class on new media and participatory culture to write and contribute to Wikipedia entries this past fall.
"One of the things they really liked about it was the ability to share knowledge beyond the professor — that audience of one," she says. While all Smith students are expected to use good research methods in their classes, knowing that their entries might be rejected outright if they didn't conform to Wikipedia's standards "felt like a higher stake than the difference between a B and an A-minus," she says.
Malkowski will be leading a workshop to help her colleagues, some of whom are less technically minded, learn how to make Wikipedia assignments in their own classes as well.
Davis says many professors report a greater level of effort from their students on Wikipedia assignments. "If you're writing something millions of people are going to read, it's a reason to do a really good job, to go into a library and get a deep understanding of the topic."
Some professors, like Tamar Carroll, an assistant professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, see Wikipedia as a way to make previously neglected areas of knowledge more visible. For Carroll, it's women's history. She says a former student recently emailed her to say that her Wikipedia entry on Mary Stafford Anthony, the suffragist and sister of Susan B. Anthony, was "the most meaningful assignment she had" as an undergraduate.
There's another learning opportunity too. Every Wikipedia entry has a "talk" page, where editors discuss changes, and a "view history" page that shows additions and deletions over time.
Peeking behind that curtain, says Malkowski, helps "expose how knowledge is collectively created and how different voices might come to consensus, or not, on a particular topic." Right now, she adds, "is an especially important time to be asking these epistemological questions."
According to the foundation's own survey, 87 percent of university faculty who participated in the program reported an increase in their students' media literacy. By grinding some Internet info-sausage themselves, essentially, they gained a better understanding of what goes into it.
It's an interesting turn of events for Wikipedia, which, as Davis acknowledges, has had a bad rap in academic circles as the lazy student's substitute for real research.
"When I first started going to academic conferences, people would hide and say, 'Don't let my department chair see me,' " talking to you, says Davis. She added that Wikipedia should only be a starting point for a university-level research paper, never a footnoted source.
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