For an upper-division composition course for engineers at the University of Southern California (USC), we edited a Wikipedia article on the Chinese online marketplace, Temu, by adding over 3,700 words and 56 references and raising the article’s maturity rating from start-class to intermediate-class. This article is very popular with daily average views in excess of 6,700, and our edits have been viewed over 110,000 times. By doing this assignment, we honed our writing, research, and collaboration skills and we were also able to integrate our multilingual skills in a formal classroom assignment. In addition, writing for a real-life and public audience helped us to view our abilities as students in a U.S. university in a more expansive way, as we could see how our language skills are valued in the classroom and on Wikipedia. 

While we all are proficient in Mandarin, we come from different backgrounds in North America and China. Nicole was born in Toronto, Canada and grew up in Beijing, speaking Mandarin at home. However, she spoke English almost exclusively at school starting in the sixth grade, as she attended an international school where speaking English was strictly enforced. Nicole majors in Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy (IYA). Peiyi also majors in Arts, Technology, the Business of Innovation at IYA  and is from Beijing. Peiyi’s first language is Mandarin, and he began learning English from an early age. Iris, from Northern California’s Bay Area, studies at IYA alongside Peiyi and Nicole. Iris is proficient in Cantonese and attended an English and Mandarin immersion school from grades K-8. The engineering major of the group, Juntong, studies computer science and applied mathematics, and like Peiyi, he was born and raised in Beijing. He expanded his English-language skills by taking Advanced Placement classes and studying abroad in high school.

We chose to work on the Temu article because we were familiar with Temu’s parent company, PinDuoDuo in China, and also because the article received a lot of daily page views but was missing a lot of key information. We wanted to help make the page more comprehensive and balanced, as it originally consisted mostly of the company’s negative reviews. As a team, we discussed some of the potential biases of the English-language sources towards Chinese businesses and brainstormed new ways of creating a well-rounded article that included the company’s problems, as well as information about how it operates. We used our Chinese-language abilities to conduct research to find quality sources to add more reliable content to the Temu article. For example, Nicole suggested we use a Chinese database, CNKI, to find academic research about Temu’s discounting and marketing policies. Because of her experience with working with CNKI sources at Tsinghua University, she was confident with the database’s credibility. Juntong also used popular Chinese news sources like NetEase for company information and facts about Temu’s parent company, PinDuoDuo. Applying these sources, we added information that is difficult to find in English-language sources.

Despite choosing the Temu page for its high volume of readers, we were still surprised at the negative and positive reactions of other editors to our additions and some of their wholesale reversions caught us off guard. Rather than engage in edit wars, however, we worked with our professor to reach out to editors and learned that they perceived our initial edits to be overly promotional and biased; in response, we removed any content that lacked a neutral tone and added more reputable sources. In this way, vigilant editors helped improve our work, and our subsequent edits about Temu’s logistics, lawsuits, and pricing strategies were not reverted. As of today, Peiyi, who, along with Iris and Juntong, made the edits on Wikipedia on behalf of our group, is the top editor for the article in terms of amount of text added.

We take great pride in our contributions to Temu’s Wikipedia page, as they contribute to the world’s understanding of a growing global company. Like many college students, we have been taught to avoid Wikipedia because anyone can edit it. However, looking at the obstacles we encountered even when adding information from reliable sources, we realized that information on Wikipedia is highly scrutinized by editors who care about Wikipedia’s quality. We also learned that adding information is not enough – we must also consider the geopolitical context in which editors operate while keeping in mind the goal of providing neutral information. 

As one of the few instances in the U.S. composition classroom in which our multilingual skills were officially part of the curriculum, the Wikipedia assignment helped boost our confidence in our communication skills. We not only added information that might not otherwise be available to English-speaking Wikipedia, but we also learned that our cultural insights can be critical tools for making meaningful and lasting contributions to the world’s encyclopedia.

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.

This past spring, like most college seniors, I was preparing to say farewell to education as I knew it, at least for the time being. To be clear, I wasn’t planning to simply stop learning after graduation. I only knew that I wasn’t going to have the same formalized structure that I’ve been privileged enough to have for practically my entire life up until now. What I didn’t know was that my approach to being a student would begin to change while I was still in classes.

That process was set in motion because I chose to take Dr. Cecelia Musselman’s science writing course as one of my final electives. As a Music and Writing combined major, I thought it’d be good to incorporate a bit more STEM into my schedule for once. Dr. Musselman’s exploration of science writing as a literary genre provided me with the perfect opportunity to broaden my horizons.

I became even more excited when I found out that Dr. Musselman’s course would entail participation in Wiki Education. While I’d been acquainted with Wikipedia in the past as a reader and had even contributed a couple of minor edits here and there, I’d never thought I’d be qualified enough to add more than a sentence or so to any particular page. Despite having been advised by teachers in the past not to trust information found on Wikipedia, I was really intimidated by the editing community. I could recall many occasions shortly after a breaking news event where I’d been amazed to find that the corresponding Wikipedia page had already been (accurately!) updated. I’d always been astonished at how Wikipedia has managed to maintain the level of order and quality it’s appeared to, especially with today’s volatile social media climate. I assumed that a crack team of expert ninja editors were responsible for ensuring this feat. I didn’t know who they were or what methods they used. It all felt a bit clandestine to me. So, naturally curious person that I am, I was thrilled to get to learn about the inner workings of it all, if a bit nervous to join the ranks of proper Wikipedians.

This same curious nature of mine was what had led me to take an interest in journalism during my time at Northeastern. Alongside Science Writing, I’d also enrolled in a reporting course for which I’d opted to interview a distinguished alumnus as part of my final project. More specifically, I had arranged to interview David S. Ferriero, former Archivist of the United States. Though I’d expected that his long and storied career would contain multitudes, I never imagined that Wikipedia would come up in our conversation.

I would come to learn that Ferriero has been enamored with the concept of a worldwide encyclopedia since the 1990s, years before Wikipedia was officially launched. While working in the libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he encountered World Wide Web Consortium director Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for a similar project. At the time, Berners-Lee’s blueprint lacked a key element that would be crucial to Ferriero’s ultimate engagement with Wikipedia: the democratization of the ability to contribute.

Ferriero would become acquainted with this component of Wikipedia during his subsequent tenure in the libraries of Duke University when he discovered that a Wikipedia page had been made about him. He was impressed to find that some initial infelicities regarding his life and career were quickly rooted out by Wikipedia’s editors. The incident inspired him to direct his staff to place links to materials from library collections into relevant Wikipedia pages, allowing for broader access to quality sources. He would also implement this procedure at the New York Public Library, where he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of The Research Libraries prior to his appointment to the federal government.

Ferriero was nominated to lead the National Archives and Records Administration by President Obama in 2009. The Obama administration had recently made a commitment to transparency by way of an executive order. What became known as the Open Government Initiative encouraged government officials to let the public into their work—in more ways than one.

“The message was, there’s a lot of expertise out there that isn’t being tapped, and how can we take advantage of that?” Ferriero said.

The approach essentially created a two-way street in which citizens would receive further insight into the operations of their government as well as additional opportunities to get involved themselves. In service of this mission, Ferriero continued on with his linking endeavors as Archivist while also hosting events such as edit-a-thons to incentivize citizens to create Wikipedia pages based on National Archives resources. He appointed the first NARA Wikipedian-in-Residence to promote further collaboration between the Archives and Wikipedia. And he even worked with Wiki Education as they trained a wider group of scholars in the art of Wikipedia editing.

His vibrant and well-demonstrated passion helped to further revolutionize my perspective on Wikipedia, as well as how I thought about the way we communicate knowledge in general. Ferriero is highly educated—he has not one, but two master’s degrees to his name. Even more notably, he’s proven himself to be quite a forward-thinking individual. Beyond being able to recognize the potential value of a worldwide encyclopedia as early as the 1990s, throughout his career, he has consistently placed a priority on staying ahead of the curve.

“My direction to the staff always has been: figure out where the people are and get our material in front of them,” he said. “Don’t expect them to find us. You need to be aggressive in determining where they are and what we can learn from them in terms of how they’re discovering information—using information—and how we can then incorporate those kinds of things into our core business.”

This philosophy explains why Ferriero became, for instance, the first Archivist to post on Facebook and Twitter and run a blog, as well as the first to oversee the creation of a completely digitized presidential library. Given how his projections about the lasting relevance of cloud computing and social media have shaken out (Ferriero also oversaw NARA’s transition to remote work during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), it seems it would be wise to take his fervent support of Wikipedia as a reliable indicator of how we will record and convey knowledge in the future. That’s why I’m all the more grateful for Dr. Musselman’s efforts to provide my classmates and me with a crash course in Wikipedia.

In the short term, my Wiki Education participation brought a number of subjects to my attention that I’d previously had no concept of whatsoever. I had the opportunity to peer review my classmates’ work on fascinating pages about marine biogenic calcification and coral dermatitis. Likewise, I was able to inform them about axial spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune disease I have whose page I’d chosen to expand. In addition to allowing me to exercise my growing passion for health communication, this experience drove home the message that everybody has unique areas of interest that are ripe for the sharing. Everyone has something they can teach, or at the very least, something they care about enough to research and ultimately share with others. This realization precipitated my broader takeaway that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the larger movement to rethink the role of gatekeepers in our society. Wikipedia has empowered anyone with an internet connection to disseminate (and acquire) knowledge about almost anything under the sun. Instead of requiring them to go through an agent or publisher to broadcast their knowledge on a given topic, Wikipedia grants its editors the opportunity to create and improve articles immediately. There’s no question that there are still inequities that need to be addressed, particularly in regard to what’s deemed a sufficiently notable article topic. But the tools to address these areas are built into Wikipedia’s infrastructure.

In fact, programs such as Wiki Education are working to make the Wikipedia community and its work more representative of the human story. For example, whereas Wikipedia editors are predominantly male, Wiki Education participants are overwhelmingly female and nonbinary. When students are given the necessary tools, they can translate their passions into articles which can, in turn, inspire others to take an interest in the subject matter at hand. The greater the number and diversity of Wikipedians, the greater the variety of knowledge that can be passed on through this wonderful collaborative project. The richer the knowledge base of Wikipedia’s contributors, the closer Wikipedia comes to achieving its goal of being the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever written.

Knowing what I know now, I would encourage newcomers—whether Wiki Education students or aspiring Wiki Scholars—who feel the way I once did not to let themselves be so intimidated by the top flight editors who keep Wikipedia running. Rather, I would advise them to find solace in their support. If you keep the information that matters to you to yourself, it may very well be lost to time someday. That is in part why archivists such as Ferriero are so keen on Wikipedia. If you choose to record what you know, however, you stand to educate and captivate an unlimited number of people. (Intrinsic learning has been found to be a top motivation for Wikipedia visitors!) Worst case scenario, you’ll receive a correction and wind up learning even more about a topic close to your heart.

Mallory Dixon is a sophomore majoring in Secondary Social Studies Education and minoring in English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In the Fall 2022 term, she took an English 103: Accelerated Composition class, taught by Dr. Matt Vetter, and worked on the Wikipedia article “History of the Incas.” In the following essay, she reflects on that experience and argues for expanded uses of Wikipedia in higher education.

August, 2022. Before the semester started, when Professor Vetter emailed the class to let us know about the curriculum for the semester, I was very wary. I was not sure what to expect and was surprised a professor was teaching an entire semester on an encyclopedia all other teachers and professors have made us stay clear of. There is a lot that goes into deciding an answer to the question of where Wikipedia stands in higher education or if it has a place in higher education at all. Our whole educational path leading up to now has designed us to quickly respond that the answer to such a question is that Wikipedia belongs nowhere near higher education and that we should not use it at all. To this day, I still have professors mentioning the negative connotations of Wikipedia. Why is it that there is such a negative feeling toward Wikipedia that educators refuse to see the good things that can come from using it? After taking a composition course themed around writing in Wikipedia with Dr. Matt Vetter, I now feel that there is a lot of good that can come from using Wikipedia as a student. Although many educators and academic scholars believe that Wikipedia has no place in the academic world, I think there is a place at the table for it nonetheless, but an open mind to the uses it could provide is definitely necessary.

First and foremost, I think the elephant in the room for this topic is those who feel Wikipedia is not to be used at all and why they feel this way. One example of someone opposed to using Wikipedia in educational contexts is Todd Pettigrew. He discusses his thoughts on how Wikipedia is inappropriate to use as a teaching tool in The Case Against Wikipedia in the Classroom. Playing a bit of devil’s advocate, he has some decent points. One of those is that Wikipedia articles are not necessarily always well-written, which is a valid statement. The idea of anyone being able to draft an article is also something that steers educators away from Wikipedia. However, maybe educators do not realize how many people who write for Wikipedia are knowledgeable about the topics they write about. Some are even professionals in the topic area. These facts are covered up by the fact that high school students and even us as college students can add information to existing articles or create new articles too. Todd Pettigrew  argues that he wants his students to read better writing than that, meaning better writing than high school students or beginner college students too. He also asserts that “students should learn how to build arguments, not write entries.”

I think Pettigrew is going about this the wrong way. Reading Wikipedia and learning to edit it as well could be extremely helpful and useful as a tool in someone’s back pocket. It is learning a new text genre and how to write for it as well. Basing the idea that you want students to read better writing than Wikipedia is a bit unrealistic. Pettigrew, and others who feel the same way, should look at it from another perspective. Educators should use the encyclopedia to teach students what could be fixed and why it is not well developed. It could be a good learning tool to look at Start or C-rated articles, for example, and to critique the writing in those articles in order to see how they could be improved to meet Wikipedia standards.

One of the essays we read that forwards a contrasting viewpoint to Pettigrew is James Purdy’s essay Wikipedia is Good for you!? Purdy discusses ways you can use Wikipedia as a base for how to do research-based writing. He is completely correct. This class on Wikipedia has taught me how to research and find reliable sources, create knowledge from those sources, and write it into an article. This is something that I think can be easily missed in English classes. Educators and students alike may not always understand that Wikipedia can be used for anything other than its content – the actual information you read in its articles. But Purdy proves that you can study how it’s written just as easily. I feel that Wikipedia is a good learning tool that we can use in schools. Educators should teach kids how to use it, how to edit it, and how to see which articles are fine-tuned and which need more development. Educating educators could be really helpful. One way to do this? Reaching out to professors and inviting them to classes or workshops for them to learn more positive ways of including Wikipedia in higher education. As someone who will be an educator once I graduate, I fully plan to utilize the things I have learned and talk to my own students about Wikipedia.

Another thing I would like to point out is the idea that these articles have a lot of academic resources and good resources that are used as sources for information. Looking at an article and using the sources they use to get more information for assignments and writing projects can be especially useful. Wikipedia does not need to be used as a citation, but take a look at the references section to see what citations are being used to build a Wikipedia article. In Alliana Drury’s essay Wikipedia’s Place in Higher Education, published previously on this website, she mentions the fact that at the bottom of every article is a list of credible sources. These are what make an article reliable and verifiable. Drury reminds us that “this is a good place to start for research” because you can use the heavy work someone else already did for finding credible sources and use them to your advantage. These are also checked by bots and people in Wikipedia to make sure they are reliable and credible sources.

Adding to my argument, some people consider the changeability of Wikipedia articles as a negative thing. I also disagree with that statement. Though I can see where they are coming from, I also understand Wikipedia’s ability to evolve as an opportunity. New information is discovered all the time leaving old articles and academic journals outdated and unusable. Wikipedia only takes one person to update an article and already it is good to go. For example, my article was on the history of the Incas. Academic journals gave me the information but what if something new was discovered and it changed so much? Maybe we deciphered something wrong or found new information through research done in Spanish-language publications. Those academic journals will need to be revised and will take so much time to get done and a new volume to be produced for the public. Wikipedia takes a few minutes of sourcing and entering new data and already it is up to date and ready for the public to see.

I really enjoyed doing the research and adding information to an article on Wikipedia. I think it taught me a lot about finding truly credible sources and making sure my writing was up to par. Deciphering credible vs. non-credible sources was difficult at first. What I thought looked good was not necessarily something that would be credible enough to stay on Wikipedia. I also chose a Start Class article knowing I had a lot more to work with when it came to adding to the article, which meant I had to do a lot more work with structure than some others.

The assignments leading up to publishing my version of the article were lengthy but also necessary. I think without really working step by step my article and research would not have been as effective. It really helped us slowly work our way to the big edit and publishing of our new content for the subjects. I do not know if I will edit again, but I like that I can go on and know how to find talk pages and the history and figure out what class the article is and how much work has been put into an article. 

This was also a different audience than I have ever written for before. Usually, students will see something for a peer review but mostly the only person seeing my writing and effort was a professor and it was solely to grade and give feedback. This was a whole new ballpark. The audience is anyone in the world with access to a computer or phone and who has internet access. Learning to deal with that pressure and use it to better my content was something I do not think I will get to experience the same way again. Research papers are fairly common in college for certain subjects and as a Social Studies Education major with a minor in English, I am sure I will have plenty to do throughout college. This opportunity was still different. The genre was a new one for me and many students in the class as well. It was a learning curve that took time to get through but eventually we got there. The idea that someone else could read my content and gain more knowledge and use it to better understand something gives you a sense of gratification. I think there is also pride to be earned when something you added sticks and isn’t removed from the article.

Higher education could benefit by including classes like this one with Professor Vetter. I think that restricting students from thinking that Wikipedia doesn’t belong in higher education is more detrimental to their future. It feels small-minded to me; to assume there are no positive things about utilizing Wikipedia seems ridiculous. I can understand reservations about allowing it to be a source for a research paper. But professors need to acknowledge that you can get a wonderful foundation of knowledge on a topic by reading Wikipedia, and that by exploring an article’s references students can also learn to interact with different genres. Before this class, I am not sure I would have agreed with my own statements but learning, researching, writing, and using Wikipedia this semester opened my mind to other possibilities of use in the future.

Works Cited

Pettigrew, Todd. “The Case Against Wikipedia in the Classroom.” Maclean’s. Accessed 16 November 2022.

Purdy, James. “Wikipedia Is Good For You!?” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 1, edited by. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlour Press, 2010. 205-224. Accessed 16 November 2022. 

Drury, Alliana. “Wikipedia’s Place in Higher Education.” Wiki Education, 9 July 2019.  Accessed 16 November 2022.

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.

FACT about My Wikidata Journey:
I am not a Librarian or a programmer!
Yet Wikidata had room for my enthusiasm

Before I head straight through how my journey with Wikidata started, here is a surprising truth you might have in common with me. I don’t have a background in programming or any IT software expertise, I only have the basics. Yet I support Wikidata and I hit the milestone of having more than 5,000 edits in 6 months!

My relation with Wikidata started with my initial journey with the big sister Wikipedia. It all started as the usual, creating a new page or article. Back then, I only used to add links via Wikidata. At a later stage I started to go to Wikidata items and started to edit the labels, and if I had enough courage I started to work on the description part with the basic understanding I had back then.  

I wanted to expand my knowledge in the programming part and I was excited to explore how to organize the knowledge and data on Wikidata. I did not actually know that there was training on how to uplift our skills and use Wikidata the right way. It also enriched my knowledge on the various tools I can make use of in the future. I learned about training from another active Wikipedian who shared the event with me and told me that there was a training course on Wikidata through Wiki Education. I directly applied and signed up for the course in July 2021 and it lasted for 3 weeks. It was super beneficial experience for me as I expanded my knowledge in a methodological way. I did all the learning models they provided in the course (8 training sessions), which provided me with a lot of knowledge in a systematic way. 

Undoubtedly, the training boosted my confidence to get familiar with Wikidata terms Q, P, E, how to add referencing, how to evaluate items relevancy and value even if I do not know much about the topic. The training made me explore these aspects and accelerated my learning through an expert Wikdatan’s guidance, not forgetting to add that the resources given about tools were so helpful. 

I was in parallel working with a colleague in Arabic Wikipedia on archiving and documenting historical resources. We started to sort it on Wikidata then move it to Arabic Wikipedia. Everything I learned through the training was transformed and applied during the documentation workshop focused on historical resources. 

Because I love to transfer knowledge to newcomers so as not to be afraid of Wikidata complexity, I contacted the Wiki World Heritage User Group, since they have good experience in Wikidata. We launched under their supervision a workshop for 6 females on the documentation of monuments in Aleppo. The workshop was for 2 weeks, we learned how to collect data on spreadsheets, learned about the tools (Quick Statements, Wikidata Query Service), and implemented what was previously learned from Wiki Education’s Wikidata Institute course. 

Since I believe in closing the gender gap on Wikidata, my inner motivation to support newcomers and my active launching of workshops, I felt that I can be a guide in this dimension, like a guide other beginners through the basics of Wikidata.

Driven by these beliefs, I launched a workshop regarding filtering and documenting terms, phrases and words in a reliable dictionary that started in Tunisia with the members of Wikimedia Levant User Group.This workshop was for 6 weeks, where it had 10 female participants. Proudly, we worked on a book that included around 850 words that needed documentation, where we documented 740 words and phrases in Arabic. This  progress can be tracked through the workshop dashboard.

This made the participants have an initial idea about Wikidata and break the fear of joining this world. They learned from an expert view point. The group work was really interactive and they were excited, each participant helped in adding or editing a minimum of 50 items during the workshop. I can recall a conversation I had with one of the participants, “Wikidata is really easy we thought it was so hard,” and I guided the conversation to ensure that “Wikidata is not easy, but the expert \ institution community is simplifying it through those trainings and previous workshops to help us support free knowledge.”

I always encourage newcomers and beginners to learn Wikidata the right way because a simple contribution done the right way will make them excited to try more and more.

My long term goal is to support the community in closing the gender gap when launching those kinds of workshops, Every contribution matters!

Want to take the same Wikidata class User:NANöR took? Visit wikiedu.org/wikidata for current offerings.

Image credit: NANöR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Trudi Jacobson is Distinguished Librarian Emerita at the University at Albany, SUNY.

The just-published book Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers (ALA Neal Schuman, 2022) makes strong connections between metaliteracy, open pedagogy, and examples of open pedagogy, with student editing of Wikipedia an exemplar. I co-authored the book with Thomas P. Mackey, Professor of Arts and Media at SUNY Empire State College.

The conception of learners as producers strongly aligns with the goals of the Wiki Education program. By editing Wikipedia articles, students have the opportunity to move from their traditional role as information consumers to an active and engaged learning model involving  informed contributions to the global Wikipedia community.

Jako Olivier, UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources and Professor of Multimodal Learning at North-West University in South Africa, writes in his foreword, “The focus on metaliterate producers in the classroom prompts associations with constructivist ideals where learners actively construct meaning and knowledge in the learning process. In an age where digital content is central as learning resources, the need for metaliteracy is becoming increasingly relevant” (p.xi). Metaliteracy, like editing on Wikipedia, also highlights the need for responsible and ethical participation in today’s interconnected environment.

Metaliteracy originally developed in the age of participatory online culture to go beyond the primarily skills-based approaches to teaching and learning in social information environments. Metaliteracy provides an overarching conception of literacy that emphasizes domains of learning, learner roles and characteristics, and goals and learning objectives that express a more engaged and ethical involvement with online and in-person communities. The idea of metaliterate learner as producer is a core pillar of metaliteracy, as explored in the first chapter in the book, which sets the scene for the following chapters by giving readers a rich understanding of the framework, firmly situating it within learning theory and pedagogical models. The second chapter focuses on how multimodal learning can engage students in their roles as producers.

Chapter three delves into open pedagogy and how metaliteracy can provide crucial scaffolding for the new, exciting, and sometimes anxiety-inducing scenario where students are asked to move beyond more traditional learning situations. It first introduces core concepts related to open education, looks at open pedagogy from students’ perspectives, and then moves on to the impact of open education on teaching and learning. In this chapter, the authors show how ”metaliteracy provides a comprehensive scaffolding and framework for the learning, and indeed the teaching, that takes place in open pedagogical environments” (p. 85).

Following this exploration of the connections between open pedagogy and metaliteracy, chapter four examines three courses that advance the goal of learners as producers. The first case study involves a course that is built around the Wiki Education program. It weaves together Wikipedia editing, metaliteracy, and several frames from the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Wiki Education instructors may find metaliteracy’s scaffolding to be of particular interest, as it can be used regardless of course topic or student level. In this chapter, telling quotes from students provide a view into how they feel about this linkage.

The metaliteracy website provides a host of open learning resources for a wide range of educational settings, as well as other information about the metaliteracy framework.

Inspired to teach with Wikipedia by the book’s case study? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support.

Image credits: Jfhughesus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stephanie S. Turner is a Professor of English in the Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Culture program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that Wikipedia is an ever-improving treasure trove of good-quality information. As an instructor of science writing, I’ve always encouraged my students to use Wikipedia to get up to speed on unfamiliar topics they were researching for an assignment. Every so often, we’d run into an under-developed article, or an article that had been flagged by the Wikipedia community as needing more research support. This gave me the idea to make writing and editing for Wikipedia an assignment. Thus began my stint as a “rogue” Wikipedia educator.

At the time, I wasn’t aware I was reinventing the wheel; I just knew it was hard! I spent hours painstakingly compiling background material available on Wikipedia explaining what it is and how people contribute to it for students to read. Digging into my files for my first semester of teaching with Wikipedia back in 2014, I can say that I was at least on the right track. It was fun finding and sharing with my students such Wikimedia Foundation explainers as “Welcome to Wikipedia” and “Evaluating Wikipedia Article Quality.” Wow, I thought, this stuff is helpful to teachers, unaware of the depth of help that was available. I located and cobbled together a collection of banners and notices on flagged articles to include in my assignment guidelines. “Here’s what to look for,” I told students: “This article may need to be rewritten entirely to comply with Wikipedia’s quality standards. You can help. The discussion page may contain suggestions”; “This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.” Why I didn’t simply embed hyperlinks to the articles themselves in the assignment guidelines is a question for the ages!

By temperament, I tend to be too DIY for my own good. But I want to know how things work, so I plodded on. I came up with an assignment component—a sort of log—requiring students to record their every activity on the Wikipedia assignment. Yes, I was aware that I could see what they were adding by tracking down their usernames and peering into their sandboxes, but pedagogically I favor thick description as a means of active learning, and I wanted to see their rationale and research questions along the way. And to be honest, the sandbox made us all a little nervous. (Can other people see what’s going on in there? What if it accidentally goes live?) So they told me what they did in their logs, including how they decided about what articles to work on, and in the end, I had them tell me what they did all over again in a reflection.

Meanwhile, my activity on Wikipedia as an educator got on the radar of some other, more experienced educators using Wikipedia. I got a couple of polite inquiries and offers of help. “You may find these useful,” someone wrote on my user talk page, linking me to some project pages. A user named Royalbroil who also teaches in Wisconsin awarded me a “barnstar,” thanking me for involving my students in Wikipedia and offering to answer “any Wisconsin-related questions.” In retrospect, these early acknowledgements from other educators paved the way for me to come down off my DIY high horse.

What it really took, though, to move me out of “rogue” educator mode was an email from Helaine Blumenthal of Wiki Education in spring 2021. “We recently learned that you’re running a Wikipedia assignment at the University of Wisconsin, and I’d like to introduce you to our programmatic offerings,” she wrote. After exploring the Wiki Education site, I knew I was ready to connect with this community. For one thing, Wiki Education emphasizes science communication, so important to what I do. The embedded dashboard seemed like a great learning management tool. But most of all, Wiki Education links Wikipedia’s mission with student learning and an informed public. I applied to the Wikipedia Student Program for the next semester.

The support I received from Wiki Education was more than I could have asked for and better than I could have imagined. For me, it was the personal touch that most impressed me. In addition to having the option to drop in on virtual office hours with Helaine throughout the semester, I was paired with a mentor, Helen Choi, who gave me concrete advice and useful materials at biweekly meetings. Technical support from Ian Ramjohn was also helpful.

The support of Wiki Education has enriched my teaching with Wikipedia. Of course, the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding, and the pudding is what the students themselves report about their experience contributing to Wikipedia. So what do they say? They want more guidance choosing science articles to work on. They like using the dashboard to track their progress through the training and exercises, but they want the work they did there to count for points in the assignment, and they want to get started on their research sooner. With this specific feedback from my students, I’m looking forward to taking my teaching with Wikipedia to the next level. Looking over my students’ reflections on the Wikipedia assignment, I think this comment conveys well the overall spirit of Wikipedia and, more personally, the transition I’ve made from teaching “rogue” to teaching within the Wiki Education community: “The collaborative . . . process that goes into making Wikipedia happen is more complex than many people realize, and it gives me an entirely new perspective on what I will use Wikipedia for in the future. The information landscape of today is always growing, and I know I can . . .  contribute . . . and help others understand certain concepts on a deeper level. When it comes to finding information, sometimes multiple, collaborative minds are better than just one.”

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image credits: Germonprez~enwiki at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Amnot Areso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In spring 2021 I added Wikipedia as a way of bringing another dimension to my course on African American foodways, in part because I felt that it would make online teaching more compelling. I was moved to do this on the recommendation of a friend in our Biology department who has taught with Wikipedia on more than one occasion. Incorporating Wiki Education into my African American Studies class I saw as a way of getting my students familiar with the digital humanities—a current initiative in Arts & Sciences—as well as raising the level of reliable, publicly accessible information about African American culture: as we know, many people first look to Wikipedia for information about something. The first few weeks of the term I thought—what did I get myself into?—but once we had our first flipped classroom (where we crowd sourced/peer edited in small groups) the light began to dawn on us all. Too, as a faculty newbie I was offered a Wiki Education mentor who talked me through the first jump, as it were, and made himself available for questions throughout. And while I tried not to bother him, knowing he was available for any queries made me more relaxed (and of course I could ask my friend, too).

Among many topics students edited articles on oyster houses (bringing to the fore the significance of African American seafood entrepreneurs), sesame (adding information on the African diasporic origins of the plant), the Cotton Club (expanding public understanding of the racial bias built into the famed supper club), and Black veganism. Prose narratives and/or scholarly sources were improved through the diligence of the undergraduates. Students wrote blog posts and end-of-term reflections in which they discussed not only what they learned about building out the content of Wikipedia but also their new knowledge regarding the use and critiquing of sources.* Some delivered lively end-of-term oral presentations on their findings, including one on collard greens. Two told me the plagiarism exercises on the Wikipedia syllabus were more helpful than what they’d learned elsewhere.**

Probably adding Wikipedia to one’s class is not for everyone. Chief among the wrinkles I faced was syncing the Wiki syllabus with my already developed course syllabus; this at least once necessitated my kicking out a day’s lesson plan for an assigned reading. Next time around I will plan for how the two streams of information can mesh more smoothly and effectively. Although I often felt I was a half-step ahead of my students, this second time around (spring 2022) I’m hoping to better guide my students. Of course, it’s also great when the students guide me—it’s good for all to learn teaching isn’t a one-way street.

To sum up: in spring 2021 I wanted to do something different while teaching on Zoom and incorporating Wikipedia research and editing allowed me to expand my pedagogical toolkit. Even if Wikipedia didn’t get me to feel tele-teaching was the best thing to happen to college instruction since the blackboard, I received enough positive student feedback to incorporate the experience the next time I teach Black Foodways.

The quotes below were taken from end-of-term evaluations.

* At first, I found Wikipedia to be slightly intimidating with all of the exercises and rules that must be followed. Not to mention, the possibility of having people comment and criticize my work was a little scary as well. In terms of the functions of Wikipedia, I found the sandbox tool to be extremely confusing and I never could figure out how to actually work it. I soon realized, however, that as long as I had polished work to publish and reliable sources to back them up, I did not really need to use the sandbox prior to making an entry.

** I feel like I have learned about plagiarism every year of my academic life, but this wiki tutorial explained it in a more comprehensive and memorable way than I had experienced before. I also was impressed to learn about how complex the automated proofreading system was and think it is really great that there are bots.

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia in your class, too? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image credit: Doc2129, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons