I'm taking a course right now, MSE 582: Surface Physics with Dr. David Cahill, where we have been assigned to create (or significanlty improve upon) two Wikipedia articles that would be equivalent two writing two 6 page papers (double spaced). When I first heard that he was going to try this new assignment in lieu of actual papers I was pretty excited because contributing to the online encyclopedia as opposed to typing some paper at the last minute that will just get scanned and returned with an "ok you did it" grade.
Everybody loves wikipedia so I needn't go on about how great it is and how much I use it. But the whole contributing thing sounds new to most people and it certainly was for me. Aside from a few minor hiccups with image copyrights (which I still haven't resolved) it was disturbingly easy to create a new article. You just create an account using your email address then you have free rein to edit anything on there (yes, you could change the definition of ... to ...) and start new pages. I had already written my article in word, so it was as simple and copy -> paste. Formatting takes a little practice but what I would recommend doing is finding an similar article/definition that you like. Then copy -> paste the entire thing over just replacing the titles, etc with what you want.
The first article had to be on a surface sensitive technique, something where you get information about a material's surface but not from the interior. I chose something that a few professors here at UIUC have been pioneering called coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) just click on that link if you want the definition. The pictures in this post, I uploaded for the definition.
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