Wikipedia:School and university projects/Vienna 2002-2003

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A small writing project was conducted at the University of Vienna, Austria in the winter term of 2002/03 (October 1, 2002 - January 31, 2003).

The vast majority of students enrolling at the Department of English speak German as their first language. Some speak one of the languages of neighbouring countries (Czech, Slovak, etc.) or other languages (Croatian, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, etc.). Only a very small percentage have English as their mother tongue or have been brought up bilingually with English as one of the two languages.

The Department of English offers an extensive programme in literary studies (both British/Irish and American/Canadian literature), linguistics, regional and cultural studies, and methodology (for those students planning to become teachers at a gymnasium). As far as language skills are concerned, courses at the Department of English are not designed to accommodate beginners or intermediate learners of English. Rather, to quote from the official Annotated Lecture List, the language courses are

based on the assumption that you have already done English up to Austrian Matura level or the equivalent. In other words, you are already more or less "Independent Users" of English. By the end of Part I (i.e. after four semesters = two years) you should be approaching a level that has been described as "Effective Operational Proficiency". This means that you should have relatively little difficulty in using the English language for most personal, public or educational purposes. You will be able to use the language both receptively and productively, in speech and in writing, with due regard for relevant features of context, situation and addressor / addressee. In addition, you will have a good grasp of the nature and structure of the language and its systems. Finally you should have attained a level of learner autonomy which will enable you to continue to develop your language and communication skills independently in the future.

The project described here was started in a second-year language class (4th semester) entitled Language in Use (two hours per week), a course based on texts of various types and designed to enable students "to understand and produce a range of spoken and written text-types relevant to the personal, educational and future occupational needs of Arts students". Assessment in language classes as described above typically includes attendance, active participation, class work, homework assignments and one or two written tests on the material covered, so the Wikipedia project was just part of the whole course. However, in the final test at the end of January students were also asked to "write an article" for Wikipedia (this was just a simulation of course) complete with [[wiki links]] etc.

Students were introduced to Wikipedia shortly after the beginning of the term and, in the course of several weeks, encouraged (rather than forced -- see "learner autonomy" above), by browsing Wikipedia, to find additional material to the texts handed out and discussed in class. In the course of the term they were regularly reminded to make themselves familiar with how Wikipedia works and to tentatively start editing articles -- correcting spelling mistakes, adding a sentence here and there, creating a link, italicizing book and film titles, and so on. There were also one or two classes during which they were invited to give oral "progress reports" on what they had already learned about, and achieved in, Wikipedia. One participant had already created the article on Alsergrund.

Then, in mid-November, they were asked to choose a topic -- any topic not yet covered in Wikipedia -- to write about. The deadline was January 6, 2003: All articles had to be posted by 23:59 that day. Immediately after saving their article students had to send an e-mail to an address they had been given beforehand confirming that they had just posted their text and giving its exact title.

A number of "hidden" tasks were included in this assignment, some of which the students only realized they had failed to complete when it was too late:

  • First of all, reflecting what encyclopaedic knowledge means at the beginning of the 21st century. In other words, students basically had to decide whether the topic they had in mind was worth writing about or not.
  • Conforming to a given style, basically by imitating it. This does not only refer to Wikipedia's NPOV policy and of course to grammatical correctness but also to formal matters (naming conventions, paragraph structure, subheadings, bold type, italicized booktitles, hypertext markup in general, etc.).
  • Realizing that plagiarism and cheating in general are not honourable. Of course none of the members of the Department interfered with these articles. However, as Wikipedia is based on peer review, a handful of students were shocked to find out that the articles they had just posted were almost immediately deleted by some other user and replaced by a notice saying "Copyright violation. This text has been taken from …". Among others, Zoe was very active at the time. On the other hand, the Jack Hodgins article remained undetected till August 2, 2003.
  • Writing an encyclopaedia entry which attracts the attention of other users. Many people stumble across Wikipedia during a Google search, so it is important to ask oneself questions such as: What exactly is it that might be of interest to other users? One participant wrote a medical article full of unintelligible jargon which was promptly rejected by another contributor -- see Autonomic nervous system (original comment from the talk page, posted only ten minutes after the article by a graduate student in biology: "This page is totally useless. Can we remove the jargon? What the fuck is the splanchnic nerve? Also, is this an original article? Can someone translate this mess? If not, we should just delete it -- it'd be easier to do it from scratch.")
  • Getting organized, dividing up one's time wisely and, eventually, meeting a deadline. January 6 is a holiday in Austria (Epiphany) and traditionally the last day of the Christmas break. As might have been expected, the majority of entries were posted between 9 p.m. and midnight that day, i. e. during the last few hours of a six-week period. E-mailed comments such as "This is the article that has messed up my whole Christmas vacation" were not infrequent.

Generally, the results were not always satisfactory. For example, a participant who still had no idea what they were doing and who, on top of that, had missed the deadline, vandalised the already existing Oscar Wilde article beyond recognition. But now for some examples of the Meisterwerke published that fateful day:

Bad technical performance of Wikipedia resulting, among other things, in students' inability to save their articles in time was the major point of criticism on the participants' part. True, meeting a deadline is especially difficult for those with limited access to computers, i.e. students who are dependent on the opening hours of the computer rooms at the university.

Sadly, the little project does not seem to have produced any long-term contributors, but, as it was up to each individual student to decide whether they wanted to log in or remain anonymous, this is generally difficult to tell. Anyway, plans are underway to launch a similar project next term.

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