Talk:Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool (Bookshelf)/Print version

Initial feedback

• Under the "notability" section: Is there any way we can add more information about selecting notable article topics? Actually, I see that we later have some suggestions, but I wonder if it would be useful to include a suggestion in the brochure, similar to what Sage talked about to me the other day. The idea is that one of the most effective ways a professor can contribute him/herself when using Wikipedia in the classroom, even without actually taking the time to edit, is to review articles within the context/scope of the course and use his/her own expertise to determine significant gaps and missing information. We've talked about this being the eventual way professors/experts can help deepen Wikipedia, but I thought it might be something nice to include as a suggestion to professors for engaging on WP themselves.
• Should we include 'student orientation' to the milestone section now? Or at least to the "For students" section? Jmathewson (talk) 21:19, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Portuguese version

 According to Tom, the Portuguese Wikipedia is much less based on consensus than other language versions. It seems like they vote on all kinds of things. Please confirm with Tom. --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 23:33, 29 August 2012 (UTC) TOM: Can you confirm? -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) Confirmed. Most decisions are based on votes. :) --Ezalvarenga (talk) 19:06, 31 August 2012 (UTC) It is also interesting to note how seldom are talk pages used on WP PT as compared to the WP EN - you can ask Jessie about this statistics. And my comparision was mostly to the English version. --Ezalvarenga (talk) 19:13, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Proposal: Let's rewrite the community section when we localize this for Portuguese -- I think that makes the most sense. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

References and links needed

Page 2 needs a reference, to say what the source of this study is. Page 4 should have a link to the wikipedia commons at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Kbarchard (talk) 00:22, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Peer reviews

On page 10, the peer reviews section has an incommplete sentence. I'm not sure where you were going with this idea.Kbarchard (talk) 00:26, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Cover

Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool

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For years, educators around the globe have been experimenting with ways to use Wikipedia in their classrooms to help teach a variety of subject areas. This document is based on the experience of educators who have taught using Wikipedia.

One theme is constant across all courses that have used Wikipedia assignments: Students are more engaged in a Wikipedia assignment than in many traditional assignments. According to survey research done by one professor participating in the Wikipedia Education Program, 72 percent of students preferred the Wikipedia assignment to a traditional assignment. Students report high levels of motivation and engagement with effective Wikipedia assignments. This brochure will help you develop such an assignment.

Here are some of the things students like about their Wikipedia assignments:

• The global audience — most students appreciate that their work could be viewed by thousands.
• The usefulness of the assignment — a lot of students like that their work serves a purpose, it isn't just graded and forgotten.
• The résumé builder — some students add a new skill to their professional summary.
• The "cool" factor — some students like showing their work to family and friends.
• The feedback — some students like getting input from the broader world.
• The different experience — some students like an alternative assignment format and learning new things.

In this brochure, we provide you with suggestions for how best to take advantage of Wikipedia's distinctive environment to achieve your particular learning objectives. We encourage you to draw inspiration from these materials and modify them to fit your particular needs.

As you prepare to use Wikipedia in your class, we encourage you to get hands-on with Wikipedia. You may be surprised.

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Wikipedia Basics

While many people are familiar with the encyclopedia portion of Wikipedia, most are unfamiliar with the community behind it. The community of volunteer editors — "Wikipedians" — are critical to the development and maintenance of the encyclopedia content. Since Wikipedia started in 2001, the community of volunteers have developed several key policies designed to ensure Wikipedia can be the best encyclopedia. You and your students should familiarize yourself with these policies.

Important Wikipedia policies

Notability

 Sidebar: See more details about the notability policy by typing WP:N into the search bar.

The concept of notability is used by Wikipedia editors to determine if a topic merits an article. In general, a topic is considered notable if there has been third-party coverage of the topic in reliable sources. Anyone interested in starting a new article should familiarize themselves with this policy before picking a topic to start a new article.

Reliable Sources

 Sidebar: See more details about the source policy by typing WP:SOURCE into the search bar.

The best sources to use on Wikipedia are third-party sources with a reputation for fact-checking. Newspapers like the New York Times, peer-reviewed academic journals, and books published by academic presses are generally seen as reliable sources for Wikipedia articles, whereas blogs, press releases, and other less formal sources should be avoided. Students should be using sources that represent significant viewpoints, rather than a one-off study or fringe work.

Neutral Point of View

 Sidebar: See more details about the neutrality policy by typing WP:NPOV into the search bar.

Wikipedia is not the place for argumentation, analysis, or advocacy. All information must be presented accurately and without bias, describing all the significant viewpoints published by reliable sources. Differing opinions on a topic should be explained, but not argued for.

Free content

All writing on Wikipedia must be original; it is not appropriate to copy and paste from other sources. The work students contribute to Wikipedia becomes part of the commons; it may be edited and reused by others under a free license.

Assume Good Faith

 Sidebar: See more details about the assume good faith policy by typing WP:AGF into the search bar.

Everyone who edits on Wikipedia, including students, should treat each other with respect and assume the other person is operating with the same goal: to improve the content on Wikipedia. Editors value civility when interacting about contentious topics. Remember to always discuss the content being edited, and not the person editing, and refrain from personal attacks. See page 9 for more information on interacting with the community of editors.

How Wikipedia is different from a college essay

Here are some ways that writing for Wikipedia may take some extra thought for students:

• Fact-based, not persuasive writing. Rather than making an argument, students will be writing a description of the information about a topic, cited to reliable sources.
• Formal tone and basic language. Articles should be written in a formal tone, but with easy-to-understand language. Wikipedia isn't the place for students to show off their extensive vocabularies. The audience of Wikipedia is global, and people who have never heard of the topic before will be reading what students are writing. Students need to clearly convey the basics of the topic in their writing.
• No large block quotes. Academic writing favors large block quotes from reputable sources, but Wikipedia's policies state that you should try to paraphrase whenever possible. Quoting from sources is encouraged, but students should try to provide the context in their own words and only quote the truly key phrase or two from the original.

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Learning Objectives

 Copy this from case studies brochure

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Assignments Types

There are many different kinds of assignments you can do with Wikipedia, based on your course goals and the time you have to dedicate to a Wikipedia assignment. In thinking about what kind of assignment you want to do, consider these questions:

• What are my learning objectives?
• How do my learning objectives tie Wikipedia in with the larger goals of my course?
• Do I want students to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia?
• How much time does the course have to dedicate to the assignment?
• To what extent can I adapt an assignment I already have to incorporate a Wikipedia element?

Case Studies

A complementary brochure, Case Studies: How professors are teaching with Wikipedia, is available at http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies. The brochure includes links to syllabi and assignment descriptions professors have used around the world. A few common assignments are listed below, but you are encouraged to consult the Case Studies brochure for more ideas.

Write an article

Ask your students to expand an existing article or create a new article on a course-related topic. Using reliable sources, students explain information about the topic. Often, professors use this assignment in conjunction with a longer analytical paper off-wiki; the student's Wikipedia article forms the literature review section of that paper.  Sidebar: See the resources section on Page 11 for a sample syllabus of this assignment.

Translate an article

Language instructors find this to be a very practical assignment. Your students take high quality articles from the Wikipedia of the language they are studying that are not currently available on their native language Wikipedia, and translate those articles into their native language.

Add illustrations to an article

If your students are adept at media, this can be a great way of contributing to Wikipedia in a non-textual way. In the past, students have photographed local monuments that had no photos illustrating the article, created infograpics to illustrate a concept on Wikipedia, or created a video that demonstrates what an article describes in words.

Copyediting

Since Wikipedia is a user-generated resource, there are plenty of typos and much room for improvement in the prose. Asking students to improve the grammar of an article is a good way for them to learn copyediting skills and think critically about how good writing is done in your discipline.

 Sidebar: See more assignment types at: http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies

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Structure of a typical Wikipedia article

 Art Direction: Screenshot here of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irene_(2005) — with callout boxes listed below.

A quality Wikipedia article is the result of a well-defined structure, encyclopedic content, and an active community.

Lead section

A lead section should summarize the key points covered in the article. Note that the lead section is without a heading. The first sentence should provide a definition of the topic of the article.

Body of the article

Headers clearly delineate appropriate sections. In the case of this article, the body covers both the history of the hurricane as well as its impact.

Appendices and footnotes

After the content comes a section with other related Wikipedia articles ("See also"), the sources used in the article ("References"), and a list of other websites people could consult for more information ("External links").

Infobox

Many articles contain an infobox that describes key elements of the topic. Find an article on a similar topic to yours and copy the code for the inbox to add one to your article.

Images

Freely licensed images can be added to Wikipedia articles from Wikimedia Commons.

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Choosing an article

Determining what articles students should work on can be a challenge. Some professors create a list of articles and ask students to pick one from the list; others require students to propose a topic. If you would like your students to create a new article, rather than improving an existing article, make sure they have read Wikipedia's notability policy and are confident the article is notable — that is, well-covered by reputable third-party sources in your field.

Do

• Ask your students to choose a topic that is well established in the discipline, but only weakly represented on Wikipedia. If there is a lot of literature available on the topic, but only a small amount of that information exists on Wikipedia, that is the best situation to work from.
• Look for articles rated "stub" or "start" class on Wikipedia's internal assessment process. You can see an article's assessment by visiting its talk page.
• Make sure you search for a few different variants on the term before creating an article. Often, you may find that a topic has already been covered under a different name.

Don't

• Try to improve articles on very broad topics (e.g. Law) or articles that are already of high quality on Wikipedia ("featured articles").
• Try to improve articles on topics that are highly controversial, e.g. Global Warming, Abortion, Scientology, etc. (Note: start a sub-article instead).
• Work on topics that are only sparsely covered by literature.
• Start articles with titles that imply an essay-like approach, e.g. The Effects That The Recent Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis has had on the US and Global Economics instead of Subprime mortgage crisis

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Wikipedia in class: Tips & tricks

Milestones

It is crucial for students who are going to be editing Wikipedia to become comfortable not only with the markup, but also the community. Requiring tiny assignments early in the term, such as those listed below, will acclimate them to the site. Professors who do not set up these milestones throughout the term usually have bad experiences with their assignments. These simple tasks prepare students for a longer Wikipedia assignment by introducing students to skills they will need later.

• Create your user page.
• Personalize your user page by adding a sentence or two about yourself.
• Improve the clarity of a sentence or two in an article related to this class.
• Leave a comment on the "Talk" page of an article related to this class.
• Find an image on Wikimedia Commons and add it to your user page.
• Upload an image to Wikimedia Commons that you have taken yourself.
• Use a reading from the course to add a reference to an article.

Editing basics

While there are a variety of tutorials online about how to edit Wikipedia, it is often more effective to take your students into a computer lab and do a hands-on introduction to wiki mark-up. This allows students to see editing take place "live," and gives them a safe space to make mistakes and ask questions in real-time. Typically, such labs last an hour or two.

If you feel comfortable enough with wiki mark-up, you can teach this lab yourself. If not, you can recruit local Wikipedians or contact your local Wikipedia Campus Ambassador (if your university has one).

Tips for what to cover:

• Bolding and italicizing text
• How to create headers
• How to edit subsections
• How to create bulleted and numbered lists
• How to create links
• How to create references
• How to create a sandbox
• Distinction between article pages, talk pages, and user pages
• Use of talk pages

It is best to have students create their user accounts before they come to the lab. This allows them to read Wikipedia's username policy and consider how anonymous they want to be on the site (and also avoids triggering the automatic limits placed on creating numerous accounts from the same location in a short time period). You might also encourage them to play around in the public sandbox.

 Sidebar: Your students can also go through an online training covering this material at: http://enwp.org/Wikipedia:Training/For_students

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Interacting with the Wikipedia community

Collaborating with the Wikipedia community is key to your students fully benefiting from Wikipedia assignments. But how do you do that?

Basic interaction

Wikipedians interact by writing messages to each other on article talk pages or user talk pages. If another user wants to communicate with you, s/he will most likely leave a message directly on your user talk page. It is a good idea to monitor and respond to these messages. All Wikipedia interaction assumes good faith. That is, until it can be demonstrated otherwise, we assume that other editors are here to help improve the encyclopedia. Therefore, all editors should be treated with respect.

When making changes to Wikipedia articles, it is expected that editors will explain their changes briefly in an edit summary. When you fill in the small box in the edit window with a phrase such as "copyediting" or "adding a reference," others will be able to follow the history of the article when they click on the "View history" tab.

To keep track of all the pages to which you are contributing, you can look at your personal watchlist, which shows you the changes to those pages. It is helpful for monitoring conversations as well as articles you are developing.

Etiquette

Like any community, Wikipedia has an etiquette. These few simple guidelines will help you get along with Wikipedians:

• Assume good faith: Assume other editors are trying to improve the project. Try to understand their point of view. Discuss. Negotiate.
• Be polite and remember that it is more difficult to read sarcasm and irony in text than in verbal form.
• Always sign your posts on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~) so that others can follow who is saying what.
• Discuss major changes you are making to the encyclopedia on article talk pages.
• Discuss article content, not editors. Do not make personal attacks.

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Grading Rubrics

How can you assess your students' contributions to Wikipedia and writing about Wikipedia? Depending on the complexity of your assignment, designing a grading rubric for it may be easy or challenging. Here are some ideas that have worked well for other instructors. More information and ideas are available at http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies.

Blog

If your project extends for an entire semester, you might consider having your students blog about their experiences. Giving them prompts every week or every two weeks, such as "To what extent are the editors on Wikipedia a self-selecting group and why?" will help them begin to think about the larger issues surrounding this online encyclopedia community. It will also give you material both on the wiki and off the wiki to grade.

Reflective paper

After the assignment is over, you might consider having students write a short reflective essay on their experiences using Wikipedia. This works well for both short and long Wikipedia projects. An interesting iteration of this is to have students write a short version of the essay before they begin editing Wikipedia, outlining their expectations, and then have them reflect on whether or not those expectations were met after they have completed the assignment.

Portfolio

Similar to the reflective paper, another possible grading method is to ask students to turn in a series of writings: (1) a collection of all of their contributions from Wikipedia and other class activities (thus reducing the need for the professor to find these student contributions on Wikipedia himself/herself), (2) a summary of and reflection on the students' interactions with other Wikipedia editors, and (3) a reflective paper discussing their experiences working on Wikipedia. By creating such a portfolio, students collect their work and debrief about their experience.

Presentation (individual or group)

You might consider having students give oral presentations on their Wikipedia experiences. This allows students to practice public speaking skills in addition to the writing skills they have learned on Wikipedia.

Peer reviews

Students could evaluate each others' work on Wikipedia, leaving reviews for each other on or off the site. These evaluations can cover questions from how well the articles embody Wikipedia's goals of Neutral Point of View to how reliable the references are to how well-written the article is.

Article history

You might consider contrasting what an article looked like before and after a student worked on it, using the article history. You can compare the beginning version with the end, extract the contributions made by the students, and see the individual changes made by the students. You may want your students to do this comparison themselves and add it to their portfolio (see portfolio above).

Sample Grading Structure

In grading a "research and write an article" type of assignment, the following grading rubric has been successful:

• 5% each (x4): Participation grade for early Wikipedia exercises
• 10%: Participation in Wikipedia discussions in class
• 10%: Peer reviews and collaboration with classmates
• 50%: Quality of your main Wikipedia contributions, evaluated in light of your reflective essay
• 10%: Reflective essay

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Additional resources

For professors

Case Studies: How professors are teaching with Wikipedia

Fifteen professors from six countries are featured in this brochure, as each explains how he or she used Wikipedia in the classroom or how he or she graded the assignment. A web component of the brochure includes links to syllabi and assignment handouts.

http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies

Sample Syllabus

This document provides a week-by-week breakdown of how you could incorporate a write a Wikipedia article assignment into your classes. It includes some key milestones that have proven to be effective at ensuring that students derive the greatest educational benefits from editing Wikipedia.

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/The_Syllabus

For students

Welcome to Wikipedia

“Welcome to Wikipedia” gives you a basic introduction to contributing to Wikipedia. You will learn how to create a Wikipedia user account, how to start editing, and how to communicate with other contributors. You will also learn how articles evolve on Wikipedia and how to rate the quality of an existing article.

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Welcome2WP_English_082310.pdf  Let's get a better link for this :-) --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 23:34, 29 August 2012 (UTC)  Absolutely -- I had one, but the outreach wiki blocked my shortened links, but I will send them to David separately!

Back cover

Ready to join the Wikipedia Education Program? Education programs already exist in many countries, and Wikimedia volunteers are creating new programs every term. In many countries where the Wikipedia Education Program is in operation, volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors are available to offer you and your student assistance in learning the best ways to contribute to Wikipedia for class.

Join us! For more information, visit education.wikimedia.org.

Legal text

 Same as Case Studies brochure.