Wikipedia now a teaching tool

Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool - Yahoo! News

I find this a great concept! Instead of students writing papers, faculty members assign students to create or edit an entry on Wikipedia. With a broader audience, students have more motivation to do an excellent job and their work is kept online (unless it's deleted as not "notable") where it is accessible to other researchers.

Faculty could also take advantage of the opportunity to talk about copyright and what rights the author does or does not retain when placing intellectual material on Wikipedia, or publishing in journals, etc.