3.2.1 Wikipedia assignments
We have all probably told students some variation of the following, “Do
not use Wikipedia as a credible source, it can be edited by anyone on
the internet!”. The open collaboration framework of Wikipedia means
that contributions are not vetted or monitored by an official entity and
adherence to community guidelines coupled with reliance on multiple
contributors, creates wariness as to its validity. However, it is
exactly this open nature of Wikipedia that has allowed instructors to
harness the power of Wikipedia to provide rich educational experiences.
In 2013, the Wiki Education Foundation (Wiki Ed) was created with the
mission to “engage students and academics to improve Wikipedia, enrich
student learning and build a more informed public.”
(https://wikiedu.org/mission-and-vision/).
This organization provides free resources and serves as a bridge for
instructors wanting to incorporate writing or editing of Wikipedia
content into their classrooms.
A major draw to Wikipedia assignments is the ease with which they can
target higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) and the specific
core competencies detailed in the BioCore (Brownell et al, 2014) and
BioSkills Guide (Clemmons et al, 2020). Assignments that involve the
assessment, editing and contribution of content to the Wikipedia
platform also tackle a host of the core concepts and competencies
detailed in Vision and Change (AAAS, 2011; 2015; 2018). Wikipedia
assignments can be as large and broad as the instructor chooses. For
example, students can be asked to create new Wikipedia articles from
scratch, to edit existing articles, or to translate existing content
into another language. As per guidance from the Wiki Ed team, these
assignments could span a few weeks to a full term
(https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/).
Additionally, these assignments are highly compatible with courses in
Ecology and Evolution because of the broad availability of article types
that instructors and students can choose to edit.
For Wikipedia assignments, all work is completed through a Wiki
Education Dashboard. The Wiki Education branch of Wikipedia builds
course dashboards, offers assignment design guidance, provides staff
support for students, and offers online trainings, all free of charge.
The staff also supports instructors and students throughout the duration
of the course. In-line with scientific teaching and backwards design,
instructors should target Wikipedia content based on course learning
objectives and the BioCore guide (i.e. Figure 3 in Brownell et al, 2014)
and the BioSkill guide (Clemmons et al, 2020). The Wiki Ed staff work
with instructors to facilitate the creation and structure of a course
dashboard and to make assignments directly compatible with the BioSkills
Guide and Bloom’s taxonomy, thus facilitating implementation and
execution of Wikipedia assignments
(https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/).
A sample dashboard from H. Schutz’s spring 2019 course can be found
here:https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/Pacific_Lutheran_University/Comparative_Anatomy_(Spring_2019).
Additionally, all course and campaign dashboards can be viewed at Wiki
Ed
(https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/explore).
It may be particularly helpful to search for ecology or evolution course
dashboards for instructors to see examples of course design and for
students to see working examples of their assignment outcomes
(Kilpatrick et al, 2020). To create a dashboard, instructors should
contact Wiki Education staff, using the form on the webpage, at least
one month prior to the start of their course.
Students engaged in Wikipedia assignments via the Wiki Education
Foundation program begin with comprehensive training and small tasks.
Students are encouraged to draft all of their work in their account
sandboxes, pages that are publicly accessible but designated as drafting
spaces. Their first assignments involve evaluation as they review
existing articles for readability, grammar and accuracy and assess the
quality of sources based on their training via the dashboard and
instructor guidance. Learning to discriminate between sources based on
their reliability and quality and identifying and correcting plagiarism
via a hands-on evaluative and iterative process is part of the Wikipedia
training and assignments. Before ever beginning to edit content,
students engage with anyone editing or monitoring the article to discuss
proposed changes. Students review, comment on, and suggest changes to
existing Wikipedia article entries in the article talk pages (a
component of every Wikipedia article where editors discuss changes and
updates to a page). Students then begin to draft content and continue in
evaluation mode throughout the semester. They also peer review the work
of other students. Students formulate revisions and plans based on peer,
instructor, and Wiki Education staff feedback (this all happens in their
sandboxes before going live). After engaging with students and other
Wikipedia editors at large (anyone, anywhere can edit Wikipedia at any
time and can engage with students) in the talk pages, students often
find support for their proposed changes and execute them on the actual
article page. As they begin to create content, students must break down
complex ideas, often from the primary literature, and then integrate,
organize, and convey this content to a broad audience. All of these
elements are deeply compatible with the Communication and Collaboration
elements in BioSkills. Additionally, educating students about plagiarism
improves their capacity to identify it (Holt, 2012). Because students
actively search for and correct plagiarism (as is done in the Wikipedia
assignment described above), their efficacy and competence in avoiding
plagiarism is much greater than if they simply read about it or
participated in an online training about plagiarism (Holt et al, 2014).
Writing is one of the primary media used in Wikipedia assignments and is
consistently associated with increased student engagement (Camfield and
Land, 2017). In particular, the use of iterative assignments that begin
early, start simply, build on one another and focus on the synthesis and
summary of ideas and include peer review can create deep learning of
content via communication of diverse and complex ideas (Balgopal et al,
2018), Building on low-stakes activities stimulates student engagement
and builds self-efficacy (Sawyer et al, 2017; Camfield et al, 2020).
Additionally, the knowledge that their work potentially reaches large
and diverse audiences drives student’s engagement and motivation
(Konieczny, 2016).
Working with students on Wikipedia not only allows instructors to target
concepts and competencies, but it can also be a way for increasing
inclusivity in a course because many of the inclusive teaching
strategies discussed above are compatible with Wikipedia assignments and
the dashboards accompanying a course. The assignments are hands-on and
active, as students are authors to all changes. Instructors can guide
students to articles for editing or development, but often students
propose their own articles to edit and they do so as part of small
teams, consequently the effort is primarily student-led. Allowing
students to choose their own entry to the content and assignment is
in-line with UDL principles. The dashboards are designed to provide
significant structure for students and are completely customizable,
therefore making incorporation of TILT and UDL principles easier. The
Wikipedia guides for best practices also invite students to produce a
reflective piece at the end of their contributions which asks them to
reflect on what they learned about how Wikipedia works, how peer review
worked for them, how they reacted to feedback, and how they were treated
by the broader Wikipedia community. Most importantly, it asks students
to reflect on the impact of their contributions. This portion is one of
the most powerful pieces of the reflection because course dashboards
track the number of edits made, number of references added, number of
media uploads and the number of article views for the duration of the
course. Students are often pleasantly shocked at the amount of traffic
their articles receive and therefore the significant readership they
have the capacity to reach.
Working with students on Wikipedia does have some pitfalls that should
be considered and addressed. Wikipedia is a community-built Encyclopedia
and thus anyone can contribute via adding, editing, or deleting content
at any time. Most editors, the people doing the bulk of contributing,
editing, and gatekeeping of posted information, are white cis-gendered
males and content often has significant ingroup bias (Oeberst et al,
2019). Content also contains both race and gender gaps (see Xing and
Vetter, 2020 for a full review) as well as gender bias (see Wagner et
al, 2015 for a review). These issues not only affect content quality,
but also generate very real concerns about online safety and comfort
that has resulted in some Wikipedia editors who identify as women to
leave the space (Menking et al, 2019). In the context of a course,
instructors can mitigate some of these effects by suggesting that
students use gender neutral account names that are not tied to their
identities. Additionally, articles linked to a Wikipedia course
dashboard are flagged as such and Wikipedia editors are encouraged to
behave generously with new student editors.
In the last decade, the Wiki Education Program’s partnerships with
instructors across disciplines to facilitate teaching with Wikipedia has
resulted in a significant surge of student editors that diversify the
editorial population by their very presence. Of the general Wikipedia
editor population only 20% identify as women, whereas 68% of student
editors do (Wiki Education, 2020https://wikiedu.org/changing/wikipedia/).
Students diversify content either as part of their assignments or
participation in various editing projects or a combination of both
(Montez, 2017; Xing and Vetter, 2020). Students can engage in the
Science and Society competencies as Wikipedia assignments can include
elements from the Women in Red project which aims to address the gender
gap in Wikipedia entries or the recent #HackforBlackLives event aimed
to improve Wikipedia content on Black academics and issues of social
justice. Additionally, much like with group work, diverse Wikipedia
teams often produce higher quality content than more homogenous ones
(Sydow et al, 2017; Lerner and Lomi, 2018).