Wikipedia Exercise

From Library Instruction Wiki

One exercise I do that I always seems to grab the students' attention is creating a "mad lib" Wikipedia article about myself. I create a new wikipedia article with my name as a title. Then I type: "Heather is a..." and I ask for a profession for me, beseech them to be creative. I've been everything from a truck driver to a race car driver to a witch. The students tend to get into the spirit of things and come up with some pretty wild articles about me. Then we put it up in Wikipedia. It gets the point across that anyone could create or edit a wikipedia article, whether or not they know anything about the subject.

This also tends to spark good conversations on if there are any times that wikipedia is appropriate.