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Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles
openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."
And when the wikipedia admins come through and start wholesale editing or deleting articles, and then banning them when they try to defend their changes, they will also get a lesson in what happens when online communities start losing track of their core mission and are taken over by people with exaggerated egos and an axe to grind.
:)
Oh, wait. This is slashdot. No one here has any idea what I'm talking about. Nevermind.
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And of course, because their articles were new and not notable, they were promptly put up for a deletion vote.
Obviously they weren't writing about Lockerbie Scotland (see Admin Slimvirgin aka the intelligence agent Linda Mack), or Circumcision (see admin Jayg). Or wrote something either of these admins felt was not notable, and deleted wholesale.
I'm tripping over myself to donate more money to WalesCultBomisOPedia!
I once asked some of my comp sci lecturers why they didn't get students to do something useful, like work on open source, instead of assigning them pointless busy work projects. Two main answers:
1. it's too hard to grade
2. it's seen by many to be exploitative.
So there ya go.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it". I don't think they understand the fact that nobody is going to cite Wikipedia as a reference for a paper, but Wikipedia does offer great sources that can be used to further explore a subject.
I would suggest teaching students how to find legitimate sources instead of using the brute-force method of blocking everything they don't understand.
Of course, another activity could be for students to take a snapshot of an article, and proceed with research (web or otherwise) to review and validate all the claims/statements. It would be a good exercise in citing sources and tuning their bullshit/propaganda detectors.
My school blocks Wikipedia entirely. When asked why the answer is "anybody can edit it".
As opposed to the rest of the internet which is chock-full of nothing but the highest quality, peer-reviewed content, written universally by the finest experts, hand selected from across the world?
I can only guess you're not reading this from a school computer, since anyone can post comments... and frankly anyone frequently does so.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In this exercise the sum total of human achievement is increased rather than decreased. I find that highly newsworthy.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
- The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.
- The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.
- Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.
- She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.
- She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.
- She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.
- Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.
- Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.
- Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.
- Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?
So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia todayI'll come out of the closet here. I have assigned this to my students in advanced courses as well. But I always make it optional. Students have a choice: write up lecture notes for one lecture to share with their fellow students in class or find an article related to the course material in Wikipedia and improve it substantially.
My experience has been that those that do this have made very nice contributions for the community. I check up on it to make sure that it is not confused. Of course, I have only tried this in the relatively small classes that we have here at Berkeley.
The academic world is about the developing and sharing of knowledge with our fellow human beings. Wikipedia seems like one of the right ways to do this for well established results with immediate benefits and very little pain.
This is not the first assignment of its type. There have been more than 40 such projects; there are at least 10 more in progress. The students and the professors need to be aware of the "No original research" policy. Many university-level assignments involve original research, and Wikipedia is not the right place for publishing original research.
Here are some of the articles created as a part of the assignments we're talking about: