Rachel Miller, PhD is an associate professor of art history at California State University, Sacramento.
When assigning art history research papers, a question from students that I always dread is “How many sources do I have to use?” I’ve tried out different responses, from a curt “As many as you need” to a lengthy explanation of the necessity of comprehensively understanding what has already been said about a topic before being able to make an original intervention. Honestly, none of these answers seem to satisfy students. Much more useful has been my implementation of Wikipedia-editing projects in several of my courses on ancient, medieval, and early modern art, where the focus is on providing a literature review of the scholarship on a particular artwork.
In these projects, students select existing Wikipedia articles on works of art, re-organize and factcheck the information that is already in the article, and add additional content. Unlike a traditional research paper, Wikipedia articles do not have an argument, and students are not allowed to add original analysis, as per Wikipedia’s policies. Because of this restriction, my students and I approach the Wikipedia assignment as if we were writing literature reviews on an art historical topic. Without the pressure to have an original contribution, students come away from this assignment with a strong grasp on how to do comprehensive research with the goal of understanding the current state of a field, while also producing a piece of writing that is useful for the millions of people who visit Wikipedia daily.
First, students need to understand what a literature review is. I explain to them that scholarship is like an ongoing conversation. When they do research on a particular topic, it’s like they’ve just walked into a room where scholars have been having a conversation without them. How do they get caught up on what has been said before they arrived? I explain that the ultimate goal is for their Wikipedia article to be a guide to this ongoing scholarly conversation for Wikipedia users who are interested in getting up to speed on this topic.
To gather sources for their literature review, I help them each find the most recent comprehensive scholarly writing on their selected artwork. For some students, this might be a recent publication in a top-tier journal like Art Bulletin or Renaissance Quarterly, where they can mine the footnotes for all the sources that have been published about their artwork. For students who are working on artworks housed in major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this could be as simple as going to the object page for the artwork on the museum’s website and accessing the comprehensive bibliography that many museums keep records of for all their holdings. For others, this might involve looking at recent museum exhibition catalogues which usually include substantial bibliographic lists for each piece in the exhibition. (Before the semester begins, when I am creating a list of possible Wikipedia articles the students might work on, I prioritize artworks that have these kinds of sources written about them.) After the students have compiled a bibliography, I review how to access these sources, including demonstrations on how to get electronic sources from our library databases and how to request physical books that we don’t have on campus via interlibrary loan.
The next step is having them read all their sources and compare and contrast the information contained with them. I tell them it is helpful to start with the oldest source they have and then take notes on how the information changes as the “scholarly conversation” progresses through time, while also paying attention to what kind of information seems to be the most contentious. I then set up a discussion board on our LMS, Canvas, where students share one heading that they plan to add to their Wikipedia article that describes some of the debate that they see in the sources. I give them this chart as a guide, which helps them figure out how to categorize the information they’re encountering:
| In your sources, if you see… | … then you should think about adding this heading |
|---|---|
| a scholarly debate over the iconography or symbolism | Iconography and/or Symbolism |
| a debate over the identity of the figures in the artwork | Identity of Figures |
| a conversation about which story is being depicted in the artwork | Subject |
| scholars connecting the work of art to some larger historical or cultural issue, such as gender issues or political events | Historical Context |
| a lot of investigation into the history of ownership of the artwork | Provenance |
| arguments about the identity of the artist | Attribution |
| arguments about the dating of the work | Dating |
| arguments about the identity of the patron | Patron |
Once the students begin drafting their articles, I talk to them a lot about “red flag” phrases such as “Scholars have said…” or “It is believed…” and how they should instead use specific names of scholars and the dates in which the arguments they’re referencing were proposed. I also talk to them about the importance of not just stating the scholar’s thesis but also giving the reader a sense of what evidence was used to support the author’s conclusion. When I give feedback on their drafts, I pay very close attention to these kinds of issues and require them to fix these problematic phrases before they can publish their edits.
I’ve found a lot of success with this way of approaching the Wikipedia editing project. Not only does it produce articles that usefully summarize important scholarly debates for a global audience (such as this one on Titian’s Pastoral Concert), it also helps students to understand that like in many scholarly fields, art historical knowledge is ever-evolving, with theories adapting when new evidence is discovered. Quite a few of my students have gone on to write more advanced research projects on the same artworks they worked on for their Wikipedia assignment. In those cases, they’ve used their research from the Wikipedia assignment as the foundation for more original scholarly investigations, confident enough in their understanding of how the scholarly conversation had unfolded before they arrived to then become an interlocutor themselves.
Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.
