Where do people get their history? The American Historical Association conducted a study in recent years on that very question and the results, reported in a table, show that most people get their history from social media, films, and television, and that a very small percentage learns about history in a formal course. My students weren’t exactly shocked to learn that, but it did give them pause. Although I don’t believe history education has to be entertaining, it should be engaging, and it obviously is not since the university is quite literally the last place the public will go for historical information. As I always tell the students, I can reach more people through Wikipedia than I will with my scholarship. So, the project matters to me, and I hope the students might adopt the same attitude. Possibly the fact that they took the content gap problem seriously (e.g., many students wrote about women) this past spring is evidence that they did.

My course focuses on the medieval Mediterranean from roughly AD 200 to 1100. The themes and goals include to describe change over time (Periodization/Global Middle Ages); to understand processes of intercultural contact and exchange (Christianization and Islamicization); to explain the shift in global influence from East to West; and to demonstrate the diversity of the medieval world. But the structure resembles less a narrative and more a thematic series of discussions, but these are built around a single specific object, person, text, or site – just like a Wikipedia entry. I devote one class day a week to working on skills; basically, on Monday I present a sample Wikipedia entry, and on Wednesday we discuss research strategies and methods to formulate an argument. Every day starts with two threads, one related to a particular aspect of writing a Wikipedia entry and the other about a potential Wikipedia topic. I gradually tie the two together by contextualizing the topic and situating its study in medieval historiography.

In practice last semester I delivered content on Monday, and we worked on method every Wednesday. Monday’s class started with an artifact followed by its context, which I unpacked gradually. For example, I showed the students a strange multi-purpose tool dating to the late Roman period. It has been called the Roman “Swiss Army Knife” in popular articles. It looks like a pocketknife with several retractable tools including a fork. Although two reputable museums with similar (allegedly) Roman multitools, one in Italy and one in England, claim the items are authentic, there is no way that could be true, because of the presence of a fork. We have only recovered one fork from the confines of the Roman Empire, and it dates to the sixth century, centuries before the multitool was made. The dates ascribed to the objects in both museums have to be at least a few centuries too early. My point here was twofold. First, you can’t simply trust everything you read; and second, the knife didn’t exist in a vacuum (i.e., if you were writing the Wikipedia article for the multitool, what would you need to know?). I emphasized that even trustworthy sources should not be read uncritically; perhaps a source lacks corroborating evidence or requires additional sources, or different sources, to be convincing. I also wanted them to appreciate that we could only know the museums were mistaken if we were aware of the wider context.

Rather than incorporating method and approach into lectures, every week I devoted Wednesday’s class entirely to building skills, from how to find sources to checking personal bias, and every few weeks I deliberately scheduled an in-class workday. Putting aside time for developing their research and writing skills was a game-changing decision. The students who regularly attended class understood concepts that the students in upper-division courses struggled to grasp. Indeed, several students told me that the course gave them skills valuable in our more advanced courses.

I’d like to share an anecdote about a particularly wonderful student project. One student, who took my suggestion to select a topic that addressed a “content gap,” chose to revise the article on the sixth-century Empress Theodora. It was a bold decision, to say the least. I warned this student that the historiography on her reign is vast and that the primary sources are dense. She was not deterred. It speaks to how much work this student had put into the project that her entry raised so many fascinating questions. I mentioned to her that the Roman historian Tacitus described the third wife of Claudius, Messalina, in a specifically sexualized way as a proxy for the Empire itself, which might also be the case with Theodora. I gave her quite a few articles to read, none of which was required, of course, but she read them anyway. She took my idea and ran with it. Her entry highlighted that the sixth-century author Procopius deliberately styles Theodora as feminine because she’s been elevated to a traditionally masculine position and operated in a masculine world. However, the palace was a unique space, at once the state and a private household, and Roman women ran the Roman household, so the empress occupied a unique position. The substance of her article was fabulous, but in my critique, I wrote that it could be improved with some discussion of how historians have understood Theodora. I could tell she took that lesson to heart. In her reflective essay, she wrote, “It is impossible to determine how we should analyze a figure or event in the modern day if we do not initially consider how it has been previously understood historically speaking.” How many students over the years internalized that message in my courses? Very few. I was so appreciative of her entry because Theodora is one of the most maligned figures in history, and her good work corrects that perspective.

The Wikipedia assignment has proved an effective means to weave together important conversations in the field with the practice of actual historical research. I am proud of what my students have contributed to the discussion and look forward to continuing this work in the future.

Teaching with Wikipedia was a transformative experience for both my students and me. I strongly recommend that faculty members consider incorporating Wiki Education into their curricula—especially faculty working in STEM fields.

For three years, I used the Wiki Education platform as one of the core elements for a course I taught as a part-time faculty member at George Washington University. Since then, I’ve discovered that few faculty members know about this incredible resource. We need to get the word out!

In my experience, Wiki Education helps students become stronger writers and better academics. It helps them to better understand the process of consuming and producing knowledge for online communities. And students get to see the immediate results of their work—substantive improvements to Wikipedia. These improvements can have a lasting impact even after the course concludes.

Teaching with Wikipedia involves much more than simply getting students to read, edit, and write Wikipedia articles. Wiki Education has developed an entire curriculum that includes training modules (with exercises and comprehension checks) that teach how to write with sources, what constitutes plagiarism, as well as the actual mechanics of editing a Wikipedia article. Wiki Education also has a dashboard that allows faculty to monitor their students’ progress through the trainings, the articles that students decide to create or edit as part of the course, the work students do in their “sandbox,” and the edits that students make to the articles on the production Wikipedia system.

All of the students in my graduate course on data science ethics were familiar with Wikipedia at the start of the semester, of course, but none of my students realized that they could actually edit Wikipedia themselves. Indeed, most of them had been told in high school and college that they should never use Wikipedia as a reference, because it wasn’t reliable. Of course, they still used Wikipedia—they just never admitted it to their teachers.

With this backstory, most of my students were genuinely surprised on the first day of class when I told them about the prominent role that Wikipedia plays in our society—and my belief that, as Wikipedia users, we have a moral obligation to correct incorrect information on the site when they see it. That’s because Wikipedia information is widely incorporated into everything from search engine results to artificial intelligence models, and it’s read by billions of people all over the world.

Quite frankly, my students were stunned that they could click the “Edit” button on a Wikipedia article, make a change, and have the result immediately reflected on Wikipedia. Many of them thought that proposed changes first had to be reviewed by a human editor. Once they understood that all changes were live, they then started to wonder why there wasn’t more vandalism. This engendered a discussion of community norms, social expectations, and both the possibility and danger of having algorithms police online spaces.

Even though I was teaching graduate students, the vast majority of them had never written for an audience other than a teacher or their friends on social media. Many were terrified by the idea that their writing would be on Wikipedia itself, viewable by anyone on the planet. Some were concerned that another Wikipedia editor might come along and criticize, correct, or simply revert what they had done. Most students were able to overcome this fear by the end of the semester. The Wiki Education dashboard made it easy to find the students who were reluctant to edit or write, which made it easy for me to provide additional support.

After students learn the basics of how Wikipedia works and how to edit articles, the Wiki Education program has students choose an article that they will either edit or write from scratch. Here again, there are tools to help students, including lists of “stub” articles in need of expansion. One of my students discovered the WikiProject Women in Red, which seeks to increase the percentage of Wikipedia biographies about women, which gave the class facts and data for discussing the presentation of women online. (As of September 2022, more than 80% of Wikipedia’s biographies are of men.) Another student made significant contributions to a page about a famous American artist. Still another had studied financial history and made significant contributions (including a graph) to better explain an important financial event.

One of the most intellectually engaging aspects of the Wikipedia assignment was what happened after students starting making edits to the article on Wikipedia, outside the safe space of their sandbox. Within days—and sometimes within hours—another Wikipedia editor would edit what my students had done! This sort of direct feedback from individuals outside the classroom was unsettling for many students at first, but it provided external validation that I could never have provided myself.

Occasionally, the edits were misinformed or even misanthropic, which also provided an important opportunity for discussion and analysis. In the intellectual world of Wikipedia, many misunderstandings can be addressed with stronger writing and better references.

Plagiarism is a growing problem in academia, and I wasn’t spared having to address the issue in the Wikipedia assignment. Wikipedia’s platform has a number of very sophisticated plagiarism detection tools. When I had students plagiarize, the student’s edits to their article were reverted and I, as the faculty member, was informed. In my experience, students were more willing to admit wrongdoing and address the underlying issue of plagiarism when the accusation came from Wikipedia than in non-Wikipedia assignments when the accusation came from me, the faculty member.

One of the problems I had with the Wikipedia assignment was conveying to students my expectations for how much work was enough. For many topics, the reason that Wikipedia articles are short or nonexistent is that there is not much in the way of authoritative, citable, secondary sources that meet Wikipedia’s citation standards. Students wanted quantifiable metrics—how many words do we need to contribute to get an A? Many students, trained their entire academic career to write papers of a specific length, were flummoxed by the open-ended nature of the Wikipedia assignment—an assignment that basically instructs students to make a significant contribution to Wikipedia.

The Wiki Education platform also includes a system to allow for peer reviews. That is, students can be assigned to review one or more articles of other students in their class. The underlying platform does a great job facilitating these reviews, and students really do benefit from having their work commented on by other students. Unfortunately, these benefits only accrue if one student actually writes their article when the article is due and the second student actually reviews it on time. Given that it is rare for 100% of the class to get their assignments in on time in part-time masters programs, I found this aspect of the Wikipedia assignment to be more hit-or-miss.

I believe that the Wikipedia assignment is particularly important for students in STEM programs because these programs frequently undervalue the importance of written communication. This is a disservice the students, as the ability to critically evaluate information and write about complex ideas for a general audience is an important professional skill for every scientist and technologist.

The assignment also transformed me and my teaching. It gave me a view into the inner world of my students through a window that would have otherwise been closed, by allowing me to see how people outside the classroom reacted to my students’ work, and to address those issues together with the students.

To learn more about incorporating an assignment like this into higher education courses, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support. Read additional instructor testimonials here.

You’ve probably heard of the Wikipedia gender gap — that far more people who identify as men edit Wikipedia than those who identify as women or other gender identities. The 2021 Community Insights report, released recently, shows the progress that’s been made on that front recently: Globally, women made up 15% of contributors, but in Northern America, where Wiki Education’s programs operate, that number is 22%. In contrast, self-reported survey data from our program participants shows:

• 67% identify as women
• 30% identify as men
• 3% identify as non-binary or other

Wiki Education’s programs are clearly making a difference in diversifying the gender identity of contributors. The gender identity of our program participants has remained fairly steady throughout the 11-year history of our program; we know we’re helping tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap, and — with nearly 15,000 new contributors every year, representing 19% of all new active editors to English Wikipedia — we’re doing it at scale.

What’s new this year is data on race and ethnicity, which the Community Insights survey asked about for contributors from the United States for the first time. The report concludes that: “In the United States, both Black and Hispanic or Latino/a/x people were severely underrepresented in our communities, while white and Asian American editors were overrepresented.” While we always expected our student population was more diverse than the general editing population, we now have data to back up our belief. Note that the Wikimedia Foundation survey allowed respondents to select multiple racial or ethnic categories, while Wiki Education’s survey instead included a more general “biracial/multiracial/other” category, so the numbers don’t perfectly align. Nevertheless, they give us a good idea of the differences.

• 89% of U.S. Wikipedia editors identify as white, while only 55% of our program participants do (compared to a U.S. population percentage of 72%).
• 8.8% of U.S. Wikipedia editors identify as Asian or Asian American, while 18% of our program participants do (compared to a U.S. population percentage of 5.7%).
• 5.2% of U.S. Wikipedia editors identify as Hispanic or Latino/a/x, while 12% of our program participants do (compared to a U.S. population percentage of 18%).
• 0.5% of U.S. Wikipedia editors identify as Black or African American, while 8% of our program participants do (compared to a U.S. population percentage of 13%).
• 0.1% of U.S. Wikipedia editors identify as Native American, while 1% of our program participants do (compared to a U.S. population percentage of 0.9%).
• An additional 6% of our program participants identify as biracial, multiracial, or another self-reported category we didn’t offer as an option.

While we have room to improve to reach parity with the U.S. population demographics, our program is clearly helping address the underrepresentation issue identified by the Wikimedia Foundation’s survey. With 8% of our participants identifying as Black or African American and 12% identifying as Hispanic or Latino/a/x, we’re bringing significantly more diversity to Wikipedia than the existing editing population represents.

A diversity of contributors is important because we need to share diverse knowledge on Wikipedia. When the people writing the content don’t accurately reflect the population at large, topics, perspectives, and sources are missing. Programs like Wiki Education’s, and those of colleagues in our movement actively working to bring more diverse contributors to the English Wikipedia, especially in the United States, are a key part of enacting knowledge equity. Freely sharing in the sum of all human knowledge, after all, requires involvement from all humans.

“Is Wikipedia always right?” queried my ever-curious seven year old. I was selected to be a participant in a weekly 12 session Wiki Scholar program sponsored by the Society of Family Planning. The somewhat intimidating goal was to learn the process of updating and curating reproductive health articles on Wikipedia. Our virtual sessions were scheduled on Mondays at 11am PST- an ideal time for my focus and solitude… until the global COVID-19 pandemic hit. Despite my best efforts of privacy and attempts at hiding, my Wiki Scholar Zoom sessions were frequently interrupted by my seven year old requesting assistance with his homeschool journal or wanting to say hi to my cohort of scholars. Finally, he asked me,  “what exactly is YOUR job at Wikipedia?”

I am a board-certified Obstetrician/Gynecologist and I provide abortion care — I was excited and a bit nervous about the perceived impact of updating family planning articles on Wikipedia. I explained to my child that Wikipedia is the go-to resource for millions of individuals for just about anything. But I also cautioned him that just because it was on Wikipedia, didn’t make it true. So, in answer to his questions, I informed him that Wikipedia is not always right and my “job” was to try and find the sections in health care (my expertise), where updates were needed.

Together we Wikipedia’d his favorite things like Darth Vader and Harry Potter to the things he dreads like flu shots and tomatoes. I showed him the updates that I had contributed to transgender sex work, abortion restrictions during COVID-19, and types of abortion restrictions in the United States. He was impressed that I was an “author” on Wikipedia. This mainstream integration of Wikipedia has persisted in his world when he squealed in excitement that Wikipedia was being utilized in the cartoon Smurfs movie.

Recently, we went on a bicycle ride through some trails near our home and spotted a two foot striped snake on the side of the path. We observed it from a distance in awe and trepidation as it slithered away into the underbrush. My son looked at me with a glimmer of intrigue in his deep hazel eyes and said, “I’ll race you home. We need to Wikipedia that snake!” Another committed user is born!

To see our open Wikipedia training courses, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

I was honored to be selected as one of Wiki Education’s 2018 Wikipedia Fellows, specifically to help address the gender balance of women in science on the open encyclopedia. This assignment dovetailed well with my personal background – I was raised by a single mom, have a young daughter, and work virtually for a professional team where I’m the only colleague with a Y-chromosome. I also credit a legacy of strong female teachers and managers with providing me guidance throughout my career. My ongoing mission? “To make scientists better through mentorship, education, and enthusiasm.”

Like many other editors, I was shocked on October 2, 2018 – the day of the announcement for the Nobel Prize in Physics, live from Sweden. I’d logged in early in the morning my time to hear the winners, and was shocked to realize that the only female recipient had no public Wikipedia page. So were many others  – the page history shows a flurry of edits and 13,000 new bytes of content added in just the first day after the Prize.

This is still a pervasive, if quiet, bias on the platform: Wikipedia tilts heavily towards minutiae in sports, entertainment, and history: Every (male) midfielder on every soccer team worldwide has been profiled, yet prominent women academics or technology leaders with multiple awards and top-shelf degrees has their pages tagged with WP:REL (a measure of relevance to society) upon creation. It wasn’t hard for me to find important female scientists to add; they were everywhere! Indeed, I went on to add or edit over 50 articles over the three months of the program, which together have received (as of this writing) over 100,000 views. Those profiled or updated included NASA explorers, synthetic chemists, start-up founders, authors, and engineers.

I encourage you to get involved if you have an idea or see an inequality you’d like fixed. Editing on Wikipedia can be straightforward – there’s some best practices to be aware of, which is where a program like Wiki Education’s comes in handy.  With that background knowledge, it takes passion, research, and about 15 minutes to create a new entry. After that, the entry will continue to grow with new references and crowd-sourced effort.

You actually become a more critical and consistent scientific writer through the process. This is true in three ways. First, you have to find substantive references for everything you include, or it will be speedily edited away or tagged for questioning. That’s the second benefit – real-time peer review by an audience of hundreds of editors worldwide, all of whom have really professional and constructive feedback. And finally, the bar you have to hit to have your article promoted as a “Did You Know?” on the front page is very high caliber – I had two of my articles so recognized, and I probably spent twice the time revising and referencing these that I had in writing the initial copy!

And it’s worth noting that you never know who you’ll influence – with numbers in the billions of reader views annually, Wikipedia really does reach into all corners of the world, and – with appropriate references and context – can sometimes be the most accurate and truthful source on a very complex topic. Such as improving the inclusion of women scientists into the global conversation.

I’m happy for you to reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email sometime to talk more about your passions for science and how to make the world a better place!

Visit learn.wikiedu.org for more information about our Wikipedia training courses.

As an APS member, I was fortunate to be able to enroll in the American Physical Society Wiki Scientists course: Biographies of Women and Minority Physicists. I was interested in this course for the same reason many of my classmates were: we are women and/or minority members of APS, and we don’t see ourselves reflected in the mainstream conversation about science as often as we should. Learning to edit Wikipedia, to contribute and improve biographies of notable women and minority scientists, is a concrete way to address that issue. But there is another reason I was interested in this course: for three years before I was a PhD student in physics, I was a science librarian, teaching college students how to do effective library research. This course appealed to me as a librarian as much as it appealed to me as a physicist.

One of the things I told students over and over again as a librarian was not to cite Wikipedia in their research papers, so perhaps it is a little counterintuitive that I would want to learn how to edit Wikipedia. If it’s not an acceptable academic resource, then who cares? But while it may not be an appropriate academic resource in most contexts, not all research is academic, and sometimes Wikipedia is exactly the source you need.

More than telling students what sources to use and what not to use, librarians strive to teach students how to judge for themselves whether a specific source is appropriate. Why is an article in Scientific American okay for the three-page “Introduction to Magnets” paper you wrote as a freshman but not okay for your senior thesis on magnetobiology? Why has poring over IMDb won you eight rounds of movie trivia but you can’t cite it in your term paper for your Introduction to American Cinema class? It’s not that any one source is bad or wrong; it’s that different circumstances call for different sources of information. Wikipedia editors know this – that’s why we list citations at the bottom of every article. If out of curiosity you want to know when Mary Shelley was born, look no further than her Wikipedia page. If you’re writing a scholarly paper about the life of Mary Shelley and the invention of science fiction (sidebar: now is as good a time as any to remind people that the genre of science fiction was invented by a woman), then scroll down a little further and look at the references that are included in her Wikipedia page. Track them down yourself.

Wikipedia is a convenient resource for teaching students about how to judge the reliability of information and determine what sources are appropriate for what situations, but if all you’re doing is evaluating what’s already on Wikipedia, then you’re missing half the equation. Wikipedia was made to be edited.

Academics, including librarians, talk sometimes about scholarly discourse. This is, among other things, the formal interaction between academics that often takes the form of peer-reviewed articles, comments on those articles, and references to those articles subsequent ones. This can feel very inaccessible to college students, who are just trying to get a grasp on reading other people’s research and may not have even thought about performing or writing up their own. Contributing to the academic discourse as a content creator is just as important as citing others’ research, but students may often feel as though they don’t have anything to contribute.

Enter Wikipedia. We may not expect college freshmen to be writing peer-reviewed articles, but that doesn’t mean they can’t engage with the community in a meaningful way. Editing, creating, and improving Wikipedia articles can be a tool for teaching students about this other half of the equation: it is not enough to absorb information; you must contribute to it as well, at whatever level you are able. Too often, students read their textbooks and take what the author writes as gospel. And even if they are savvy enough to spot an error in their textbook, what are they supposed to do about it? Wikipedia is a platform where information can be corrected in a second. This is an important lesson for students: the content creators whose work you have been absorbing for most of your education are no different than you. You should feel empowered to participate in content creation just as much as content consumption. Indeed, the further into academia you go, the more you have a responsibility to be involved on both sides of the equation.

So it turns out Wikipedia is an academic resource, although perhaps not in the traditional sense. It is a resource for teaching students how to engage with content, how to think critically about whether something meets certain academic standards and then, instead of shrugging their shoulders and walking away when it does not, stepping in to improve it. I’m very glad I was able to take this APS Wiki Scientists course. I hope I am able to continue editing Wikipedia on my own, and if I ever find myself in front of a classroom of students again, I hope I am able to teach them the value of participating in content creation, from Wikipedia to peer review.

To see our open Wikipedia training courses, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

As many of you know, the WITH Foundation and our grantees are working toward inclusive and transformative healthcare. A facet of this work involves making information about disability and healthcare accessible for people who are looking for it. which is why we’re sponsoring this opportunity for experts to learn how to add information to the site through Wiki Education’s Wiki Scientists courses. We’d like to invite you to consider joining the second cohort of WITH Wiki Scientists. Apply now for a seat in the June-August course!

Why Wikipedia?

Wikipedia as an avenue for fortifying public information with the most evidence-based, current research out there. Wikipedia is also a place to translate research into accessible language for a general, non-academic audience. Information can be empowering and reduce stigma. This Wiki Scientists course is a chance to invite more people into the Wiki community for disability advocacy and to give back to the information resource we all know and use.

A Wikipedia training course for experts

In February of this year, we supported the first cohort of Wiki Scientists to embark on this WITH-sponsored mission. The group included healthcare professionals and advocates,; behavioral therapists, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and academics; and disability activists. We were thrilled that people were drawn to the course across such a diverse range of fields, united by their passion for information access and health advocacy. The overwhelming interest in our first cohort just helped drive home that Wikipedia is a great way to bring these experts together for a common purpose.

The cohort of 17 wrapped up their course last week and added more than 11,000 words to Wikipedia pages related to disability, disability healthcare, and activism. These pages have already been viewed 130,000 times since the group began making improvements. Here are some highlights:

Kathleen Downes, a licensed social worker and one of our WITH Wiki Scientists, was less than impressed with the depiction of spastic cerebral palsy on Wikipedia. She uploaded a photo of herself as a child to the page and made numerous improvements to the content. “A difficult task is finding information written by disabled folks themselves,” Kathleen wrote in a blog about her course experience. “I hope that a parent whose kid was recently diagnosed will Google spastic cerebral palsy one day, find my page, and realize it’s not all doom and gloom.”

Another great example of how powerful the course can be for increasing access to well-researched information can be seen in the improvements made to Wikipedia’s page about muteness. Another Wiki Scientist added brand new sections that hadn’t existed on the page before, including more information about organic causes, psychological causes, developmental and neurological causes, and treatment. They also doubled the references cited throughout the page. Click here to see the “before” and here to see the page’s current state with the improvements.

And the page on the Civil Rights Act of 1968 didn’t cover how the Fair Housing Act applies to people with disabilities before a Wiki Scientist added a sub-section devoted to the subject. This page alone has received 26,000 pageviews since February.

How to apply

Wiki Education and the WITH Foundation believe that involving experts in adding content to Wikipedia can have a lasting impact. We encourage disability healthcare scholars, disability healthcare practitioners, and/or disability studies scholars to apply. Scholars and practitioners with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply!  Want to be a part of the movement? Join the next course!

• Course dates: June 15 – September 4 (12 weeks). Meeting time will be determined via the registration form based on registrants’ shared availability.
• Time commitment per week: 1 hour virtual, collaborative meeting; 2 additional hours of independent work
• Cost: The full cost of enrollment in this course is covered by the WITH Foundation.
• Goal: to improve healthcare and disability-related pages on Wikipedia, the most utilized healthcare resource in the world.
• Apply here by May 29th, 2020. Applicants will be notified of acceptance status by June 8th,

Read more about the course by visiting wikiedu.org/WITH

As someone who grew up in the 90’s I definitely looked to Wikipedia for a quick introduction to a topic, but I never pondered where and how its content was generated. However, like most academics I had been taught not to cite it and to take everything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Fast forward 12 years to when I was attending the American Society for Ichthyologists and Herpetologist annual meeting and attended a symposium run by Wiki Education. The symposium inspired me to try conducting an interesting assignment that would touch on several information literacy criteria in a 100 level Biology class at Occidental college in Los Angeles.

While the assignment itself was mostly successful because the students in my class worked together to update existing (but undeveloped) Wikipedia pages of animals that excited them, I quickly realized that I lacked the expertise I wanted to support the assignment. Wiki Education does have an incredible system in place that allows an instructor who isn’t confident to work with Wikipedia editing to run Wikipedia-based assignments. The students in the class were happy about the assignment and said that it really taught them the value of taking the time to understand the premise of a website or any other online content. However, I left that class wanting to invest more time learning how to edit Wikipedia before taking a stab at assigning a Wikipedia assignment again or even recommending it to another faculty member, since I have now transitioned to a role equivalent to a Science Librarian and want to be better able to guide other instructors running Wikipedia assignments.

I had signed up to get emails from Wiki Education and the opportunity to join the Science and Society course in 2020 as a part of professional development was too good to ignore. I initially signed up thinking that I would create pages around research topics in the Biology department (I hope to get to that with the help of our student body) and then decided instead to work on developing species and genus records of herpetofauna that I had directly worked with during my graduate research instead. The reason was twofold; I knew that I had the expertise to evaluate all the material and that I could very easily reach out to experts if I got stuck anywhere. I also realized that I was sitting on a huge collection of high-quality images that would be best used if shared on the Wikimedia Commons platform rather than sitting on a personal hard drive. With that in mind I started working on one species page for Raorchestes jayarami and one genus page on Raorchestes that were stubs and needed improvement. Along the way, due to time constraints, I narrowed my focus to the genus stub and was humbled by how much more information I needed to synthesize than I had originally planned for. My research on the anurans of the genus Raorchestes had been limited to species in south India and I hadn’t parsed through material from other parts of Asia. To do justice to the page I needed to make sure it was as complete as possible. I was also surprised by the lack of reaction to updates on these pages which was well supported by discussions in the course about biases on Wikipedia and really thinking about how the idea of ‘notability’ differs vastly because of biases in historic representation.

One of the things that kept me going were our weekly Zoom meetings where all the participants discussed progress, general questions and concerns, and learnt more about the Wikipedia community. It was motivational to see all the progress that my fellow participants had made, the complex questions that they had, and to learn about wiki gnomes and other wonderful wiki beings. While I did struggle to dedicate the recommended weekly time to the course, I learnt a lot from these regular discussions with the group. The Slack channel for the course was an added plus for feedback and suggestions during other times.

After the experience of the class, I plan to continue working on species and genus pages, as well as others, time permitting. And my advice to anyone on the fence about running a Wikipedia assignment is to be brave and take the plunge. Wiki Education has wonderful staff who are driven to scaffold such endeavors and make it a fruitful foray into integrating information literacy in your classroom.

To teach a Wikipedia writing assignment in your own course, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Join folks working in Academia, political science, public policy, and journalism as they improve Wikipedia pages related to COVID-19 by applying for our free Wiki Scientist course here.

Header image CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.