Wikipedia as a teaching tool

For many years, I have been working with my students to transform typical term projects into useful contributions to Wikipedia. (If you are interested, there are a number of articles about the early efforts, as this got a bunch of media attention after Andreas Brockhaus and I gave a talk on this at Educause). Over the years, the work has changed, and as I revisited this effort this winter, I find it has changed again, rather dramatically. I've found a number of challenges to working with Wikipedia, and I'd like to share my experiences and reflections on a few of these in hope that it will help others work more effectively with Wikipedia.

First, the encyclopedia is truly enormous, and many popular topics are already covered extensively enough to make it difficult for students to find a place for new contributions. This is a challenge that has only grown over time as both the quantity, and especially the quality of Wikipedia entries advances. One way I have coped with this is to encourage editing, rather than new contributions. Here, students are vetting the coverage and the suitability of the references, and making changes as needed. This is extremely useful for their learning, and has great outcomes for the quality of the entries in Wikipedia. I find this also is a great warm up exercise to a larger project. Another way to cope with this reality is to encourage the student to identify a side-issue to the well-covered one, and develop their entry around this issue. This allows them all the excitement of completely developing a section or even a new page, without their work being redundant to what is already there. A benefit of this type of assignment is the overarching lesson about scholarship and the ways in which scholarly work is incremental, which is often hard to have students grasp. Particularly by highlighting the history of a complex article in Wikipedia, students can get a sense of how it has grown, the diversity of collaborators who have made contributions over time, and this provides a great proxy for the kinds of growth that occur in fields over even longer time frames in the scholarly literature.

A newer issue surrounds the much greater attention that each new entry is subjected to, and the raising of quality standards in general. Now, many Wikipedians are devoting their energies to scanning new entries, and flagging and often deleting entries that do not meet certain their core content policies (e.g., verifiability (including references) and writing from a Neutral Point of View- NPOV). The fact that these standards are enforced is a fabulous demonstration that the insistence we profs have on well-referenced writing is a concern in the world at large, not just some strange obsession of academics. However, it poses a real problem for the incremental approach I had advocated for students, wherein they post a bit of what they are doing and then a bit more, and often, the referencing is going in last. Several students had their posts reversed so quickly they thought something had gone wrong in how they saved their posts. This layer of confusion was extremely unhelpful, and also led to many hours wasted by students repeating the same actions that were deemed unacceptable and then deleted.

The solution to this, I think, is two-fold. Primarily, I need to better educate my students in how to work in Wikipedia, and watch their posts and the editing that follows. Although I teach all of this, I think we probably need to do the first posts in the computer lab with me ready to trouble shoot and illustrate specific problems as they arise for everyone to learn from. In this instance, our computer lab came too early, and some students forgot most of the lessons before really working on Wikipedia. This also requires me to be up to date on the current standards - which change rapidly.

Secondly, and connected to the fast pace of change in policy and practice at Wikipedia, I now think it wise for instructors to sign on to the Wikipedia education projects more formally (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects). It is now much more common for instructors to include assignments to work in Wikipedia, and the organization has responded with guidelines, and recruited volunteers to help with this sort of collaboration: "In 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation has expressed official support for teaching with Wikipedia and facilitated the creation of a dedicated group of volunteers that you can ask for assistance in your course." I did not work with these folks, and now I wish that I had. I think I'd have prevented more mis-steps by my students and thereby reduced their frustration considerably.

Mostly, this post is about the process of working with Wikipedia assignments, generally. I continue to believe that these projects are valuable, particularly because Wikipedia is so high profile. The reinforcement of many of the standards we seek them to reach in their research writing are well matched by the standards here. Added to this, is an empowering message that all of us can contribute to increasing access to knowledge, and that increasingly we should consider making such contributions. Some of my students continue to contribute to Wikipedia beyond their class experience. Many of them have contributions that stand years later as well constructed and informative pieces. It is not a perfect approach, but it has a lot to recommend it, once you orient yourself (and reorient yourself) to the best of Wikipedia practice each term.