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UK University Students begin to shape Wikipedia

Fri, 09 Mar 2007
Wikipedia has long been held as a place where students could get encyclopaedic definitions of absolutely anything - from debt to travel and iPods to cars.

But now postgraduate students from the UK are helping to refine and expand Wikipedia's online encyclopedia as part of their university course.

The University of East Anglia's postgraduate students who are studying a range of courses from Finance to English, are themselves being assessed as they edit existing articles and develop their own articles.

Growing in numbers since its inception, Wikipedia is essentially a forum which uses a social form of authorship for its aricles. One of the University of East Anglia's Politics lecturers, Dr Nicola Pratt has said that Wikipedia can nurture any students' research skills.

However, many are unsure where they stand with Wikipedia. Firstly, due to its collaborative nature and less formal method of collaborating material, and secondly due to many fakes that are being exposed through the site.

However Dr Pratt believes Wikipedia to be a useful study tool, not a method to copy others work.