Using Wikipedia As The Teaching Assignment

I've posted earlier on whether professors should allow the use of Wikipedia as a research source and if so, what guidance should be given students.  Professor Martha Groom (University of Washington at Bothell) is using Wikipedia as the outlet for her students' term papers.   As she notes, "Term papers are intended for an extremely limited audience" [the teacher]...while online websites such as Wikipedia have a much larger audience.  She goes on to note that the possibility that many others are reading their work motivates students to write better and to make sure that they don't plagiarize copyrighted material as this would be caught by the readers.