Although this is optional, it is highly encouraged. If a student completes this assignment, his or her score will be used to replace his or her lowest score of the thirteen scheduled quizzes.
In its early years, Wikipedia was rife with factual errors, and could not be seen as a credible source of information. As time has progressed, however, the community-edited nature of Wikipedia has resulted in a source of information that is as accurate as conventional encyclopedias, and it has the potential to surpass that level of accuracy. Because Wikipedia has become the primary source of information for the American public regarding psychology, the Association for Psychological Science recently launched the Wikipedia Initiative, in which they urged psychological scientists and their students to become involved in adding accurate information to Wikipedia articles and evaluating the quality of the articles already online. Please see http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
In order to receive credit for this assignment, you will write a short encyclopedia entry—at least 200 words—about the psychologist about whom you wrote your term paper.
In other cases, there will be no extant entry, so your assignment will be to create a brief introductory entry. To see an example of a well-done NEW entry, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Leary&oldid=485095529; nothing existed on this page until a previous student added this content.
By 8:00 a.m. on April 4, 2012 (two weeks after the due date for the term paper), create an account at www.wikipedia.org and add your encyclopedia entry. By the same date, you must also send me an e-mail that includes your username and the content that you added to the entry.
Please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article for guidance on writing a Wikipedia article. Please note this articles need to be written objectively and factually, and those entries without published sources are soon deleted.
