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-boun...@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@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 <domusau...@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 <pio...@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 > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wiki-research-l mailing list > > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > > > > -- > www.domusaurea.org > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
