Disclaimer: Having never contributed to a wiki before, I can say with the utmost confidence that I can fix them ;)
Abstract: Student participation is the final mile in implementing any type of constructivist or communicative activity. As wikis become more and more used by teachers and schools, and fit nicely with a constructivist approach, I felt that just expecting kids to "know" how to use a wiki or going through the very laborious and teacher transmission focused tutorial on how to use a wiki would be ineffective and probably prevent students from using them. So why not set up a wiki like a game?
The idea would be to build good practices that promote the use of a wiki. Here are some proposals which are markers in this meme. The student or user needs to participate in order to unlock different abilities which then in turn unlock more abilities and ultimately lead to a measurement of "trust" on the part of that account user. The economy of this wiki game could/would be: letters contributed/Time spent lurking.
Here are some possible examples of this theme.
(1) *look before you leap* After signing in and logging on, students need to click through n number of wiki pages to unlock the ability to edit. (the wiki counts the number of pages viewed by the user and continues to keep these statistics for later trustworthiness.
(2) *a picture is worth a thousand words* After the user contributes 1K characters/words, uploading pictures to the wiki is unlocked.
(3) *giving credit where credit is due* citing n sources unlocks the embedding of video.
(4) *stubborn as a mule* have a sentence on a wiki persist through n time unlocks hyperlinking
You get the idea...-- wuss, Apr 26 2012 Picture....1000 words.... photography_20rewor...20avoid_20verbosity [not_morrison_rm, Apr 28 2012] You haven't yet quite grasped the level of tech-savvy possessed by the average ten-year-old boy, have you?-- UnaBubba, Apr 27 2012 @UnaBubba. Why not girls?-- wuss, Apr 27 2012 I think the *a picture is worth a thousand words* is the issue, we had no great agreement on either picture size or resolution. c-linq.-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 28 2012 random, halfbakery