I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had heard about
the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student
assignment in which student could singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia
article. The lecturer had broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be
completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose
it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3. Write/expand the Wikipedia
article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but assumed it would
not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was
wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to
Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university
librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have
done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be
contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the timetabling it was
not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on
the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with a presentation) but also
addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware).
This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good
lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the
"edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the
Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do
their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems
(people who did not create their account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting
new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the
lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had
been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad
(I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded
further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not
been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the
worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, there is no
doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the
known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and
digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet
and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some
complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of
contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP
address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should
create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people
don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB
mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group
who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally
followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their
user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that things could
have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know
about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a proposed
experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, instead of all the
wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things,
we would be much better served if we tried to find a way to communicate with universities
about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into
our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit.
Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is how things currently work)
isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Morgan
Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER
having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this
research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho,
obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete
picture).
Best,
J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques <domusaurea(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences
and from what
colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the
experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
1. Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack
of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community
(leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with
infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in
editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the
outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to
hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings,
Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what
researchers think about
teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it?
AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some
on effects on students and some about what instructors think about
Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has
actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from
my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I
think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back
and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to
and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior
papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my
goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but
if someone really, really, really would want to join this project
because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the
future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I
sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private
message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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