modern sabotage

In a meeting today of Linguistics 101 teachers at Rutgers we were discussing plagiarism.  A colleague made a hilarious suggestion: give students a homework question about topic x, then go to the wikipedia article on topic x and alter it to be incorrect.  Laugh at the results.  I expanded on the theme, positing that one could insert a random word, say, donut, into the entry on topic x and expect to see donut on at least one submitted homework. I might actually try this.

2 comments
  1. Mike F says: May 13, 200718:18

    wikipedia has its own denizens who patrol and correct most articles. you’d have to sit around editing the wiki all night.

  2. susan says: June 1, 200715:08

    Yeah in my next post I point out that I wouldn’t actually do this as it’s not that difficult to tell when students are plagiarizing. Also I’m one of those denizens!

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