User:Jbmurray/Advice

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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities

The following is advice for educators (primarily professors or university lecturers) on using Wikipedia on a college level-course. I hope it is also of use to those working in educational technology. And it may perhaps be of interest to students who are taking such courses.

This advice is based on my experience with Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, a Wikipedia project that I coordinated in Spring 2008, as part of a course on Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia.

Wikipedia can be a rewarding and productive part of the college curriculum. It can also be a challenge and, undoubtedly, a disappointment. Because this is such a popular and successful site, one which you and your students have probably used many times, it can be easy to assume that you know how it works. But beware: there is much still to learn.

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[edit] Create an account

Wikipedia is not, I think, something you can leave to the students. You are going to have to be an active participant. So you should create an account and be prepared to work alongside the students, rather than simply directing them.

The key to Wikipedia is collaboration. The students will find themselves collaborating with many other Wikipedians. And you will be collaborating with them, and with the students, too.

Moreover, for all its apparent (and often, actual) anarchy, in practice Wikipedia is in fact a very code-bound institution, which has its own culture and its own mores. If you choose to use Wikipeda in the classroom, you will inevitably be giving up a fair amount of your own autonomy as a professor.

You should therefore learn how Wikipedia works.

[edit] Practice

The best way of learning how Wikipedia works is to start editing it yourself.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia. You should start early and spend some significant time finding your way around. There is masses of online documentation and help; in fact, there is probably too much and soon you will find yourself lost and/or overawed.

You can find out about Wikipedia's basic principles at Wikipedia:Five pillars. You can explore the help pages. You can read Wikipedia:How to edit a page. There is an Editing FAQ and a Contributing FAQ as well as a tutorial. (See? There is if anything too much guidance on offer.) But there is no substitute for experience and practice, for getting stuck in.

You should probably not even decide to use Wikipedia in the classroom before you yourself have spent several weeks editing, and notched up several hundred edits of your own.

You should take the time to familiarize yourself with Wikipedia even if you already know your way around Wiki software that you may have used elsewhere. What makes Wikipedia different is that there are thousands of other editors active on the site at any one time.

As well as editing articles, by clicking on the "edit this page" tab that is at the top of almost every page on the site, you should also explore and start interacting on the "talk" pages (click the "discussion" tab), drop notes on other people's "user" pages, and spend some time on the "Wikipedia" pages where decisions are made and policies formulated.

At some point you will probably run into conflict with other users: they will disagree with your changes, revert your edits, and perhaps leave warnings on your talk page, quoting your breach of one guideline or another. Indeed, you are probably not sufficiently experienced with Wikipedia until you have had to deal with several such conflict situations.

[edit] Enroll and announce

Once (if) you have decided to proceed with a Wikipedia-based assignment, you should enroll as an educational assignment, and announce the fact far and wide.

WikiProjects are groups of Wikipedians who have gathered together to tend to articles related to a particular topic: South America, Critical Theory, Literature, or whatever. Most of these projects, however, are at best fitfully only active. There is even a WikiProject on classroom coordination, designed specifically to help educators on Wikipedia. Over the course of Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, however, this project seemed to be entirely dormant.

You can also, however, frame your own project as a WikiProject. This is an alternative to using your own user page as the focus of the enterprise. I recommend this: it in fact makes little practical difference, but it is in sync with Wikipedia norms and culture, and so adds a form of legitimacy. When Wikipedia gets a group of editors together with a set of common goals, they form a WikiProject. There is nothing to stop you from doing the same.

Give your project a snazzy title, why don't you? Set up your project, and set up a shortcut (this is a WikiPedia sine qua non). Now you're almost open for business.

[edit] Goals and methodology

But what exactly are you open for business to do? It's worth considering your goals and methodology. There are a number of options, and here are two of the most important:

  1. Whether you simply want your students to write something (perhaps anything), which you will subsequently grade on your own terms, or whether you want their articles to go through one or more of the Wikipedia review processes.
  2. Whether all their work is to be directly in Wikipedia "mainspace" (where the site's regular articles resides), or whether they are first to write elsewhere, and only subsequently to transfer their work to the mainspace.

These issues are related, in that they both concern the amount of feedback (as well as collaboration and criticism) to which your students and their work will be exposed.

As soon as anybody contributes to Wikipedia, they immediately open their work to public scrutiny. Indeed, every time you click "edit this page," you will see the text "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it." Wikipedia is a very large stage on which students can publish their work for general benefit, but it is also an arena in which they can be exposed to a noisy and hostile audience, who will also want at times to get in on the act.

But the presence of this community, the fact that Wikipedia is a collaborative process in which your writing is no longer fully your own (a fact enshrined in the site's strictures against "article ownership") is also an incredible resource.