Wikification

There's post about a very interesting, and very ambitious, student Wikipedia assignment over on Posthegemony. The project involves students writing and editing articles for Wikipedia from their semester's work with the aim of getting their articles to "featured article" status. Posthegemony writes:

I decided to include wikipedia as a central part of a course I was teaching in the belief that it was only by actively contributing to the encyclopedia that students would learn about its weaknesses, as well as its strengths. ...

the assignment was that, in groups, the students should edit (and in a couple of cases create) wikipedia articles on the texts and authors that we were covering, and that over the course of the semester they should bring these articles up to what in wikipedia parlance is called "featured article" status.

When setting that assignment, I had not really comprehended how ambitious it was. Wikipedia defines a "featured article" as an article that "exemplifies [its] very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation." And its standards are, in fact, impressively high. Indeed, it is a central paradox of wikipedia that its standards are impeccable, even as its actual performance so often lags far behind these standards. To give some indication: fewer than 0.1% of wikipedia's articles are featured articles. ...

I liked the idea that students would be engaging in a real world project, with tangible and public, if not necessarily permanent, effects. In the end, an essay or an exam is an instance of busywork: usually written in haste; for one particular reader, the professor; and thereafter discarded. ...

I declared from the outset that a group that turned its article into a "featured article" would receive an A+, no questions asked; and that groups that achieved "good article" status (a lower hurdle, though good articles still account for only about 0.15% of wikipedia's total) would receive an A. The assignment grade, in other words, would be determined by collective, public, peer review. ...

As of April 1, 2008, with still a couple of weeks of the class to run, they have now brought four articles up to this standard: The President (novel), The General in His Labyrinth, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. ... I can't tell you how proud I am of these students.

I think this is a wonderful, and wonderfully useful, course project. I've been guiding students through the process of writing a large wikipedia article this year. Next year, I may consider having the next class aim at improving the article to "featured status."

Teaching Wikipedians

This link comes by way of academhack. It is an op-ed piece written by Cathy N. Davidson on the recent Wikipedia dustup at Middlebury College. Davidson writes:

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students?

Rather than banning Wikipedia, why not make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses? Instead of resorting to the "Delete" button for new forms of collaborative knowledge made possible by the Internet, why not make the practice of research in the digital age the object of study? That is already happening, of course, but we could do more. For example, some professors already ask students to pursue archival research for a paper and then to post their writing on a class wiki. It's just another step to ask them to post their labors on Wikipedia, where they can learn to participate in a community of lifelong learners.

I have actually been doing this in class this semester.

The central text for our course had no Wikipedia article yet, so I created and posted a brief outline of the book as a new article on Wikipedia. The major writing assignment for students in the class has been to write chapter by chapter summaries and to post them to the new Wikipedia entry. The article is now over 10,000 words and is really pretty good. It certainly could use more work, and right now I'm thinking that continuing to revise the entry may be the job of future classes.

The best part of this assignment, however, has been that the students have been VERY enthusiastic about it. Their writing doesn't seem like busy work to them. It's useful and meaningful to the world outside of the classroom and they are very proud of their creation. It has been a heartening teaching experience for me and I'm looking forward to using this method in other courses. I think it could easily be adapted to most classes where the Wikipedia article on some concept, book, author, or event could easily benefit from some focused attention by a group of students and their professor. And since nothing is ever lost on Wikipedia, the article can always be reverted back to a previous incarnation if the student work is judged to have done more harm than good. Plus, teaching students to be bold enough to change, edit, challenge and contribute to collaborative online communities is, I think, a worthwhile goal apart from any concrete results in online verbiage created.

Oh, dear

Jon Swift: Conservapedia

"For years homeschooled children have had to rely for all of their information on Wikipedia, which is full of dangerous ideas that homeschooling was supposed to prevent from seeping into the home. Now, finally, there is an alternative, which doesn't have any controversial ideas at all: Conservapedia. Conservapedia is based on good Christian values, unlike Wikipedia, which I gather from the name, is based on Wiccan."