InsideHigherEd.com has an interesting article culled from a presentation on incorporating wikipedia into classroom assignments. Rather than disparaging the source, despite shortcomings real and imagined, it sounds like an intriguing task.

Martha Groom, a professor at the [University of Washington's] Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences program, [did] last fall by requiring term papers to be submitted to the popular, user-edited online encyclopedia.

Groom’s first attempt at incorporating Wikipedia into a class came in the fall of 2006, when she required her students to make a major revision to an existing article or to create one of their own, with a minimum of 1,500 words, for 60 percent of the grade. The assignment, for her course on environmental history and globalization, encompassed an initial proposal, a first draft, revisions and peer review, after which students would post the final article to the Web site. For the next semester, and after student feedback, Groom decided to lower the weight of the assignment (to 40 percent of the grade) and have students work in groups.

It's nice to see people making intelligent use of the source. I've tried something like this on a voluntary basis and students liked it, but had some trouble when the wiki they created at the class site was the source for their assumed plagiarism when they moved the material over to wikpedia itself. But they got that squared away.