Before the pandemic, the article was viewed by a couple dozen of readers each day. In the month since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic on March 11, the page was viewed by an average of 330 readers every day, with a total of 9,869 views! The article includes the important section “Exotic trade and disease outbreaks”, which is particularly important to readers right now.

With education disrupted around the world, learners are increasingly turning to Wikipedia to fill their knowledge needs. On average, over 280,000,000 readers have turned to English Wikipedia each day in the month after a global pandemic was declared. Student work can fill that critical need to provide free information accessible to a general audience.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know to get started.

For many writing assignments, the exercise is in the writing.  Students cherish every word of feedback. They thoughtfully apply comments to future writing or analysis.  Oh, wait. No. Realistically? Even fabulous students read feedback and then slip the paper to the back of their notebook rarely to be viewed again save to be incorporated into a future exercise or exam.  And yet, when students write for a broader audience, the process changes significantly.

I fell in love with the idea of revising Wikipedia with students when another history professor raved on Twitter about the benefits of having students revise historical pages.  For my history M.A. students, largely comprised of current and future teachers, the assignment worked well. Many within the class came of age with the “don’t trust Wikipedia” mantra to the point that we pushed up our sleeves and embraced our role as muckrakers.  What’s in the meat? Or, for our purposes, how can we be critically engaged users of and contributors to Wikipedia?

I pitched the assignment as follows:

Your assignment is to locate an individual from early American history whose Wikipedia page could use revision.  There is no page or word requirement, but instead you must use at least four secondary sources.  Grading will be based on how effectively you use the sources.

Why revise Wikipedia?

Two primary reasons.
First, students often start here for their research.  Google now pushes Wikipedia pages up in their searches to combat the tautology of confirmation bias in a lot of searching (query a conspiracy theory and you can very well get sucked into a vortex of websites claiming to affirm the conspiracy).  Thus, it is helpful to pull back the curtain and understand Wikipedia’s own process and epistemology.¹
Second, updating Wikipedia means contributing to the edifice of public knowledge.  In order to combat circular logic and reductionism in their algorithm, Google itself selects Wikipedia entries as top results for its search engine.  Thus, it is in our best interests as a society to improve upon this base of historical knowledge.

First off, a caveat.  The very thing I enjoyed about this project – having students write for a generalized public – was the very thing some students found intimidating.  Were they right in how they represented the history?  Was their research fair to the subject?  Was their writing accessible and sufficiently proofread?  These were the very things I wanted them to contemplate.  How wonderful to have this be an organic part of the assignment.  Before constructing a similar assignment, ask yourself, is it fair to expect every single student completing this assignment to have sufficient skills to perform this work?  To put themselves out there? On the flip side, I had other students who shrugged at this—not a concern.

Assigning this project for a graduate seminar worked well. As graduate students, their research and writing skills were sufficiently developed for this assignment. As a seminar, having fewer than twenty students allowed for providing feedback for individual research and writing.

Researching the Past for the Sake of the Present

Our class focused on Early American biography, with a particular eye for contributing to one of Wiki Education’s stated goals: to strengthen the pages of marginalized figures.  Focusing on one mode of history (biography) enabled methodological focus. In class, we discussed biography as a field, historians’ perceptions of “notability” versus those outlined in Wikipedia policy, identifying “content gaps,” search tips, and the importance of historical context.  All of these issues enabled pragmatic discussions on epistemologies of historical writing, and comparing notes on our challenges and triumphs. (Sample challenge? Circular citing in which you find several sources, but citing each other, relying upon a smaller number of primary sources and thus giving little new content). And we did have triumphs.

While Wikipedia policy explicitly prefers editors use secondary sources, primary sources are also clearly used.  In my handout, I advised my students, “Often it incorporates the primary sources in more illustrative than evidentiary ways – less to substantiate an argument and more to illustrate the history for viewers.”  In practice, this went out the window. Students in the class fell in love with their subjects. They dug deep, first in secondary sources, and then reaching out to organizations in a position to know more about their subject.

Several students found people – local museums, Native American tribal associations, a military academy (West Point) – who were delighted to have researchers evince knowledge and appreciation for their biographical subjects.  These organizations passed on resources and permission to post new materials. One student reached out to a second organization only to be referred back to the Wikipedia article with effusive compliments on the page’s revisions, not realizing her role in the updates.  Students began with secondary materials and approached their research with respect and appreciation for the impact their edits could have on people alive today.

Students also shared sleuthing tips with their classmates, from the trenches.  For some understudied yet notable individuals, for example, looking at sources focused on people close to that individual yielded more information than researching their person.  Students also shared tips for bolstering the recognition of their individual, such as editing related pages to ensure links back to their page. All of this illustrated the contingency of history and historical writing.

You are not alone:  Wiki Education

Wiki Education and their wonderful staff made this assignment possible.  They provide useful tools to train students in the technology and process of editing Wikipedia.  They raise concerns familiar to researchers: plagiarism, sourcing, evaluating materials.

Our point person answered questions from anyone in the class throughout the course and served as a touchstone about resources within Wikipedia.  This became especially valuable as students navigated the complex community guidelines expected of them by other editors on the site. Policies are both community-written and enforced, which brought up interesting in-class discussions about how Wikipedia content is ultimately regulated.   How does the community of volunteers decide when competing editors wrangle over content? As users, there is an entire behind-the-scenes world of discussion. The same is true in the historical profession, albeit for the latter, in a more hierarchical framework of expertise, affiliations, and peer review.  Ironically, both rely on an astounding amount of free labor.

Editing & Teaching the Tool

One of the common challenges of this type of assignment is that it requires a certain amount of time to teach the tool that is therefore time taken away from teaching desired skills.  Thankfully, while there was a learning curve here, it was not steep. The technology is very accessible. Also, again, Wiki Education helped with this by providing a platform, tutorials that I could select to assign or not to assign, and a kind and generous contact person.

For my class, teaching the tool was itself a part of the project.  Because they are students and teachers themselves, I explicitly made reflecting upon Wikipedia’s organization as a content-tool for students and the public a part of the assignment.  For my class, the consensus view about Wikipedia was straightforward. The good? It’s easy to edit. The bad? It’s easy to edit.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into an upcoming course? Our free resources and student trainings help you do it. Read more or get started by visiting teach.wikiedu.org.

1. See, for example, Louise Matsakis, “Don’t Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet:  YouTube and other tech giants have repeatedly turned to Wikipedia to help solve some of their biggest problems,” Wired 16 March 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-wikipedia-content-moderation-internet/.

Header/thumbnail image by Victorrocha, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Two of the new pages are about novels originally published in French: one from Canada and the other from France. The first, Suzanne, was published in 2015 by Canadian author Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. The work is a biographical novel of the author’s grandmother Suzanne Meloche, a poet and painter who interacted with many French-Canadian artists and historical events. Much of the information is based on the findings of a private investigator hired by Barbeau-Lavalette. It was a bestseller in Quebec and other French-speaking areas, particularly France, and won the Prix des libraires du Québec. The second novel, Incest was published in 1999 by French author Christine Angot. This work is a fictionalized biography, or autofiction, where the author and the protagonist share the same name and occasionally the same experiences. The story follows an anxious, depressed woman named Christine as she works through emotional turmoil following the end of her relationship with her lover and first lesbian partner Marie-Christine. Christine conveys her thoughts in a very disconnected manner as she discusses with readers the complicated relationships with her ex-lover, her ex-husband, her young daughter, and her father, who instigated an incestuous relationship with Christine when she was a teenager. Angot received criticism for the close resemblance between her characters and those related to her, creating a debate regarding the role of fiction in regards to public action, as well as the responsibility of an author to control the implications created by their works. This criticism would prove to be an ongoing issue for the author, as in 2013 Angot was successfully sued by her lover’s ex-partner for defamation of her character in Angot’s novel Les Petits.

Another two pages focused on Spanish language works. Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 horror novel Fever Dream has elements of psychological fiction and takes inspiration from the environmental problems in Argentina. The novel follows its protagonist Amanda as she struggles to piece together the events that led her to wake up disoriented in a clinic. However as she regains her memories and tells her story to David, a young boy also in the clinic, Amanda begins to realize that David is more integral to the story – as well as to the possible location of her daughter Nina. The Transmigration of Bodies is a 2013 post-apocalyptic noir fiction novel by Mexican author Yuri Herrera. Set in an unidentified Mexican city, the book focuses on an underworld fixer who tries to arrange a peaceful exchange of bodies between two rival criminal gangs in a corrupt city that is in the midst of an epidemic. It is also the second book in a trilogy, however the final book in the series was actually the first to be published in the United States and the first book the last.

For some, Wikipedia is the easiest way to learn about a new concept or topic, which is why additions from students and instructors using the site as an educational tool can make such a big difference in the world. If you would like to include Wikipedia editing as a learning tool with your class, visit teach.wikiedu.org and gain access to our free tools, online trainings, and printed materials.

Header image by Heffloaf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On the first day of 1995 people began to gather at the Myeong-dong Cathedral. They came with the knowledge that they would be there for many days, as many as it would take to reach their goals. So began the 1995 Myeong-Dong migrant labor protest, which lasted a total of nine days and opposed the Industrial Trainee System (ITS), which they stated systematically produced a population of vulnerable, bottom-tier migrant workers in the labor market. Thirteen Nepalese migrant workers, who were previously contracted under the ITS, arrived in South Korea in hopes of escaping the poverty in their own country. However their hopes were dashed when employers withheld wages for over six months and then beat and abused them when the workers demanded to receive their wages directly. During the protest the demonstrators shackled their necks with iron chains, exposing their struggles as migrant laborers and drawing a parallel to slavery. They were soon joined by others, especially grassroots religious organizations, who protested in solidarity. In response to the protest the state acknowledged the systematic issues from the ITS and changed the Labor Standards Law to include migrant workers and industrial trainees contracted by the ITS in legislation regarding industrial accidents, medical insurances, and minimum wage arrangements. However it should be noted that this still did not address the issues of toxic and inhumane working conditions and the production cycle of unauthorized workers. This realization eventually led to the creation of the Migrant Workers’ Support Movement (MWSM) and Joint Committee for Migrant Workers in Korea (JCMK).

Along with migrant workers, women are also at risk of being exploited for labor – something not limited to any one particular country. Women have been organizing to address workplace issues such as unequal pay and workplace violence as early as the 1880s. In 2006, several women gathered together to join their male coworkers in the South Korean KTX Train Attendant Union Strike, which protested the hiring practices of irregular workers. The women also protested against sexual harassment they had experienced in their workplace. The majority of the men from the KRWU (the union for the KTX workers) stopped protesting after 4 days; however, the women continued their strike. Over the course of 12 years, many workers dropped out of the strike; however, 180 continued until 2018 when the Railway Workers’ Union and Korea Railroad Corporation came to an agreement in which these 180 of the crew members were reinstated.

The following years also included protests, as demonstrators gathered for both the Hyehwa Station Protest in 2016 as well as the Yellow Ribbon Campaign and Sewol Ferry Protest Movement in 2014. The Hyehwa Station Protest was formed to protest against the discrimination of women and crimes involving spy cameras, also known as molka. Many of these spy camera cases go unreported or undetected, and those that are reported typically do not lead to prison sentences. The Yellow Ribbon Campaign and Sewol Ferry Protest Movement occurred after the Sewol Ferry sinking, where about 63% of the people on board the ferry died after the ship capsized and several crew members abandoned it and its passengers. Many of these deaths occurred as a result of the crew ordering passengers to remain in their cabins and not alerting them to the evacuation of the ship. In the days following the sinking it was also discovered that the ship was in poor shape and was carrying over twice its maximum limit of cargo, which was also not secured properly. The regular ferry captain had warned the ship’s owners, Chonghaejin Marine, of this but was met with hostility and threats of losing his job. The yellow ribbon became a prevalent symbol in South Korea. Its significance evolved during the course of the protest, as people began to realize that many did not survive and the gathering focus turned from mourning and hopes of return to activism and democratization. In 2017, three years after the Sewol Ferry Sinking, the former president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, was removed from office. During the months leading up to this event, the yellow symbols of Sewol commemoration were always present on political slogans and impeachment demonstrations.

Wikipedia has a wealth of knowledge, however the site cannot grow without users contributing and correcting information to the site. A Wikipedia writing assignment is a wonderful way to teach your students about technical writing, collaboration, and sourcing in a unique learning environment. If you are interested in using Wikipedia with your next class, visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out how you can gain access to tools, online trainings, and printed materials.

Header/thumbnail image by Republic of Korea Government, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

When I agreed to teach News Editing for the Spring 2019 semester, I went into full throttle to plan for a course that I had not taught in three years. What bothered me more was that the course content, although necessary and relevant, is dry and bland. Sprucing up the class lectures and assessments was my top goal, but I did not know what that would look like.

My answer came in November 2018 when I attended a faculty development workshop on my campus presented by instructional librarian Amy Dye Reeves, who completed a Wikipedia editing course for professionals, taught by Wiki Education, earlier in the year. As she was speaking, the idea to integrate Wikipedia into my News Editing course started taking shape in my head. I decided on the spot to involve Wikipedia as an experiential learning activity for my students. Minutes after the session ended, I returned to my office and signed up for a Wiki Education course page.  

When the spring semester began in mid-January, I devoted the first week to building support among my students for Wikipedia. We explored how Wikipedia could build their editing skills through a series of themes. First, we discussed the importance of their editing contributions to enhance the accuracy of Wikipedia content. Second, we discussed ways in which Wikipedia is used in academic and nonacademic environments. Third, instruction centered on how Wikipedia content is based on established sources, that it’s not original research, and how the writing must be neutral and free of bias. 

Aligning course content to Wikipedia

For successful integration of Wikipedia into the News Editing course, these learning objectives served as the foundation: 

1. Demonstrate mastery of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence syntax.

2. Verify sources of information.

3. Edit for accuracy. 

4. Edit copy for the online platform.

5. Edit copy according to legal and ethical issues.

6. Demonstrate proficient application of rules in The Associated Press Stylebook.

The class met for 75 minutes on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Mondays, lectures and formative assessment applications were conducted on a particular content area. These areas included grammar, punctuation, precision, accuracy, language and style, and legal and ethical concepts. For 14 weeks, each Wednesday was designated Wikipedia Wednesday, when students applied what they learned on Monday by editing a prescribed number of articles on Wednesday. In addition to editing, the students spent a portion of Wednesday’s class researching and writing their own Wikipedia articles. Students also conducted peer reviews of the Wikipedia articles they wrote. Students reflected on their experiences in weekly discussion board prompts in Canvas, the university’s learning management system.

Assessment

Wikipedia assignments were worth 40 percent of a student’s final grade and based on four components: 1. class participation during Wikipedia Wednesdays, 2. discussion board assignments, 3. article development, and 4. presentation of their experience at the university’s Scholars Week celebration in April. Rubrics were used to assess the editing, writing, and discussion assignments. A student’s grade was not based on whether his or her article was published. Several drafts were submitted before the final one, with instructor feedback provided each time.

I designed discussion board assignments in Canvas for students to reflect on their editing and writing experiences that day and comment on the course material applied. Here is an example:

Editing language was discussed in class on Monday. This means we as editors strive to eliminate wordiness. Proper grammar, precision and accuracy also are important. Reflect on these concepts. Describe your editing process today. 

Provide the title of the Wikipedia articles you edited and links to the articles. Strive to edit three articles today.

In addition, here are tasks for writing your article:

1. Develop your outline.

2. Find at least two sources for now to help you begin your research. Document those in your discussion post.

3. To begin writing your article in the sandbox, access the Wiki Education training module introducing the concept.

In your post, discuss your progress on your article, as well as any other insights that you wish to provide. 

Your response should be approximately 150-200 words and must be posted before the end of class. Respond to at least one other post before the deadline. Points will be deducted if no peer response is recorded.

In their posts, students had to provide links to the articles they edited and comment on peers’ posts. The number of articles the students edited varied. For example, students might be tasked to edit three articles one week. The next week, the number could be higher or lower, depending on the content area discussed on the previous Monday. 

Results/Student Feedback

In Spring 2019, 12 students edited 116 articles, making 321 total edits and adding 9,500 words. Five students had articles published on Wikipedia, plus seven Commons uploads such as photos. Students were able to include their Wikipedia editing history as part of their portfolio, qualifying this activity as an experiential learning artifact.

In addition, I have shared my Wikipedia work at conferences. My instructional design of Wikipedia in the journalism classroom was selected as a winning entry in a teaching contest at the Association for the Education of Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference held in early August. For the Fall 2019 semester, Wikipedia again is a major learning activity for another course that I teach — in-depth reporting. We are in a new kind of information age that demands the need for greater accuracy, and I am eager to guide students on this journey as we work to shape Wikipedia into a source for everyone to use.

To incorporate a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course, visit teach.wikiedu.org to access our free assignment templates, student trainings, and tools.

Header image by Murray State, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Shrine of Khwaja Abd Allah, commonly called the Shrine at Gazur Gah and the Abdullah Ansari Shrine Complex, is the funerary compound of the Sufi saint Khwaja Abdullah Ansari. It was built by architect Qavam al-Din of Shiraz in 1425, in Herat, Afghanistan and the patron of this monument is Shah Rukh, ruler of the Timurid dynasty. He commissioned the site as a memorial mausoleum for patron-saint Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, a Sufi mystic. Much of the focus of the complex is given to the east iwan, a rectangular interior space with one un-walled side. The facade consists of three entrances from the large polygonal bay, covered in intricate mosaics. Despite the grandeur of the ornamentation, the iwan walls are rough. This is likely due to the rushed nature of construction, which only took around three years despite the fact that decoration itself is usually completed in the same length of time. Historians believe this suggests that Qavam al-Din designed the ornamentation himself, which was then executed by a team of mosaicists.

Another example of Islamic architecture is the Al-Firdaws Madrasa, a 13th-century complex located southwest of Bab al-Maqam in Aleppo, Syria. It was established in 1235/36 by Dayfa Khatun, who would later serve as the Ayyubid regent of Aleppo, and consists of a madrasa, mausoleum, and other functional spaces. The complex is the largest and best known of the Ayyubid madrasas in Aleppo and due to its location outside the city walls, the madrasa was developed as a freestanding structure. This central location is believed by historians to have been chosen in order to demonstrate the power and wealth of the ruler of Aleppo to any passerby and because the site’s strong religious ties would have earned continuous words of prayer from passersby.

Other articles created and expanded by these students includes the one on Maqama, a literary genre which alternates the Arabic rhymed prose known as Saj‘ with intervals of poetry in which rhetorical extravagance is conspicuous. Originally in Arabic prosimetric, there are only eleven illustrated versions of the Maqāmāt from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that survive to this day. These Maqāmāt manuscripts were likely created and illustrated for the specialized book markets in cities such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus, rather than for any particular patron. Elite and educated classes were the audience for these manuscripts, as the Maqāmāt was largely appreciated and valued for its nuanced poetry and language choice, rather than its manuscript illustrations.

Are you interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out how you can gain access to our free tools, online trainings, and printed materials.

Header image by K.A.C Creswell, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

“In exploring the diverse artistic contributions, interventions, and aesthetic experiments by women in Latin America, we will find that Latina art has evolved through a conversation with women’s movements in the U.S. and abroad,” reads Dr. Strathman’s course description. As part of a 12-week scaffolded assignment, students explored the exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1965-1980, formerly on display at the Hammer Museum, and wrote Wikipedia biographies for the participants. Not only are their careers and works fascinating, but the artists’ positioning themselves within local and international politics through their art also speaks to rich cultural histories. And now, thanks to these students diving deep, these histories can be surfaced through one of the most-accessed websites in the world.

Head over to Wikipedia to read all about installation artist and author Sylvia Salazar Simpson, who uses (often decaying) food in her art to trigger audiences’ memories through smell. Or dive into the work of Colombian photographer and mixed-media artist Rosa Navarro, who explores the concept of “self” through self-portraits. Isabel Castro‘s portraiture work is powerful, as well; her series, “Women Under Fire”, explores the forced sterilization of Mexican American women in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Johanna Hamann has a brand new biography, too; she uses strong imagery through her sculpture work to deconstruct Peruvian politics and to comment on oppressive stereotypes enforced on women. And Maria Adela Diaz, born during the Guatemalan Civil War, sees political issues as central to her identity and has stated that her preferred artistic medium is her own body. Read about the careers and accomplishments of these women (and more!) on Wikipedia.

Only 18% of Wikipedia biographies are about women and there are many barriers to creating new pages. To warrant an article, a person must have coverage in several secondary sources unrelated to themselves or their employer. If women aren’t featured or recognized as much as their male counterparts in popular culture, that bias will be reflected on Wikipedia. College students are well-equipped to correct this imbalance, and in doing so learn some valuable lessons. Students often have access to sources through their institution that people outside the university community may not. By leveraging those sources (and maybe even consulting their librarian for help for the first time!) students can have a direct effect on closing the gender gap on Wikipedia.

We hear from instructors that it can be energizing to see students contribute to public knowledge. For students, the autonomy* that the assignment provides is inspiring (*many of our assignment templates give students the tools to choose a Wikipedia article they want to create or improve).

As one instructor we supported last term remarked in our survey, “There are few assignments that incorporate all of my course goals (teaching critical thinking, practicing research skills, writing intensive work, facilitating collaboration between students, teaching practical skills, and incorporating equity work) in a succinct manner. The cherry on top was the degree to which students engaged with the project and created thoughtful and significant edits.”

Interested in adapting a Wikipedia writing assignment to fit your course? Head over to teach.wikiedu.org to access the free assignment templates and tools we offer.

Header image by Parque de la Memoria, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Thumbnail image by Cecilia Vicuna, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently co-directed a Wiki Education-supported class with Dr. Amin Azzam aimed at getting medical students to edit medical articles on Wikipedia. This is my story of how we got students from different countries to participate in a fully online course and made Wikipedia more reliable for people around the world seeking reliable medical information.  

When I saw an e-mail from Osmosis, a popular online platform for medical students that incorporates both open educational resources and proprietary videos, promising a free online course for medical students interested in editing Wikipedia my interest was piqued. But I’m not a medical student! I am an instructional designer for the Medical College of Wisconsin, looking to explore how the students at our 3 campuses leverage anything that is not a part of the formal curriculum. Nevertheless, I sent in an email to the director of the course, Dr. Azzam, asking how I could help him run the course anyway. He was very receptive, as he typically has a librarian partner with him to deliver the traditional course and did not have one for this experiment. I hold a Masters in Library and Information Science and help faculty deliver online education as an instructional designer. Dr. Azzam and I brainstormed about all the great things we would have available for students. But would any students show up? We didn’t know.

Part of my approach to instructional design is looking and testing tools beyond the lecture and textbook; if I can understand how students use tools to further their own learning, then I can help medical educators in their delivery and approach to teaching. Classroom participation in the first years of medical school have precipitously declined¹, as students are self-directing their own learning with the hopes of passing their licensure boards, starting with the high-stakes high-stress USMLE STEP 1 exam that students typically need to pass after their first or second year of medical school but before beginning their participation in clinics. This exam contains hundreds of difficult science questions, and Wikipedia is one of many tools that students use to study for it.

We had 11 students sign up for the course. They attended live web chat sessions from the UK, Mexico, India, and the United States. Some had taken Step 1 already, and attended before or after their clinical hours, while others have yet to take the test but use Wikipedia in their studying.  After viewing Wiki Education training modules and working collaboratively to create a peer review system for each other’s’ articles, the group made 294 edits to 28 Wikipedia pages, adding 7,620 words, 1 image, and 71 references.  Not bad for an entirely self-selecting group of students! I helped answer questions about reliable resources and offered some suggestions for different research databases, but this group was a highly self-directed cohort, looking to make a difference in the rare moments that they had spare time. For me, the Wiki Education tools were crucial in easing their fears of making a mistake, and I know that the same modules will be valuable in easing faculty members’ fears of incorporating Wikipedia into their own lesson plans.

Wikipedia is a highly studied platform nowadays in education literature. Over the past decade I’ve seen its educational reputation evolve from an afterthought (or outright classroom ban²) to a recommended tool³ for short-term knowledge acquisition over more expensive digital platforms. Professionally, I evolved from citing directly as an undergraduate student from it and being admonished for doing so, to copy-editing articles, to wanting to incorporate it into the curriculum somewhere, anywhere within my health sciences university. 

Due to high-stakes tests such as the Step 1 and other exams delivered within courses, medical school is incredibly stressful. The first medical educators conference I attended featured a plenary speaker that said we are making our students sicker in the first two years of the curriculum. And while a majority of medical schools now institute wellness programs for their students⁴, I often think about how I can make a positive impact on these students’ lives. I want no part of building curriculum projects that they perceive as busy work, or as additional stressors. Medical school does loads of high-stakes testing, but compared to their undergraduate experiences, students receive far less formative learning experiences. This is where I felt that editing Wikipedia could come into play. I feel that it can give students agency, by turning them from an inactive “sponge” of information to a contributor to the world’s most visited health resource. I feel that it can help them study for their boards, by providing them access to a lot of the scientific factoids their faculty members talk about, but without the hassle of paying for expensive software licenses or using less-preferred tools provided by their school administration. I feel that Wikipedia can be a gateway to future medical professionals that want to practice global medicine⁵, because one can make a world-class article that is directly accessible by patients across the globe. Wikipedia can be all these things, and it felt really good to be apart of a class that proved that over the summer.

1. https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/medical-school-life/why-some-medical-students-are-cutting-class-get-ahead

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schools_and_colleges_banned_WP_in_2007-2008

3. Scaffidi MA, Khan R, Wang C, Keren D, Tsui C, Garg A, Brar S, Valoo K, Bonert M, de Wolff JF, Heilman J, Grover SC. Comparison of the Impact of Wikipedia, UpToDate, and a Digital Textbook on Short-Term Knowledge Acquisition Among Medical Students: Randomized Controlled Trial of Three Web-Based Resources. JMIR Med Educ, 2017;3(2):e20

4. Dyrbye, L. N., Sciolla, A. F., Dekhtyar, M., Rajasekaran, S., Allgood, J. A., Rea, M., … & Stephens, M. B. (2019). Medical School Strategies to Address Student Well-Being: A National Survey. Academic Medicine, 94(6), 861-868.

5. Heilman JM, Kemmann E, Bonert M, Chatterjee A, Ragar B, Beards GM, Iberri DJ, Harvey M, Thomas B, Stomp W, Martone MF, Lodge DJ, Vondracek A, de Wolff JF, Liber C, Grover SC, Vickers TJ, Meskó B, Laurent MR. Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion. J Med Internet Res, 2011;13(1):e14

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to access our free assignment templates and resources.

How can we help our students feel that their work in the writing classroom matters? Students struggle to see the point of crafting meticulous assignments when their work ultimately reaches an audience of one. Instead, this summer, I challenged my students to write for an audience of 500 million.

English-language Wikipedia is the fifth most-visited website in the world, averaging 18 billion pageviews per month. It frequently appears on the front page of Google searches. If you ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Home a question, chances are the answer comes from Wikipedia. This global reach, combined with the encyclopedia’s model of open collaboration, makes it a uniquely challenging and rewarding teaching tool. Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, and those contributions will be seen by an almost unthinkably large audience.

Wiki Education recognizes the pedagogical promise of Wikipedia. They offer teachers robust sets of trainings, assignments, and tools to help integrate Wikipedia editing assignments into classrooms.

I’ve experimented with asking students to edit Wikipedia in the past, but this summer, I decided to build an entire six-week intensive composition course around the project. In our class on “Writing Women Back into STEM History,” students chose a historical woman who worked in a STEM field but was not yet represented by a biography on Wikipedia, and they set out to contribute a complete article about her.

Each of our scaffolded assignments helped students prepare for the daunting task of writing for 500 million potential readers. First, they compiled a collaborative annotated bibliography, full of sources they could mine for information and cite in their eventual articles. As they researched, they made use of Wiki Education’s training modules to learn how to craft and format their contributions to meet Wikipedia’s standards. They peer reviewed each other’s drafts and presented their research orally, sharing in story form all of the fascinating and world-changing projects their women had worked on. Finally, they pushed their drafts “live” on Wikipedia where more experienced editors could expand upon their work.

It was a thrill to see the brand new articles up on the site. As of this writing, 11 of my students’ articles, representing almost 13,000 words and 208 citations, are live on Wikipedia.

In their final reflections for the course, students commented that contributing to Wikipedia helped them think about audience and voice in ways they never had before. “The stakes seemed higher than usual,” one student wrote. “It made [the assignment] feel important and impactful.”

To read more about the articles Dr. Edwards’ students worked on, check out our recent roundup. For more information about our free tools and systems of support for an assignment like this, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image by Mistercontributer, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.