On a sunny Monday in May, I headed to Tulane University’s Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching to run a “Teaching with Wikipedia” faculty workshop. Associate Director of Classroom Engagement Toni Weiss hosted me for an an intimate, hour long talk during which I spoke with interested faculty from the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese departments.
We discussed the 285 languages that have their own distinct, active Wikipedias. Each community of editors develops its own unique set of rules and guidelines, something people most familiar with the English Wikipedia might not know or understand. Core elements of the project and the mission are the same, but content creation, sourcing, and citation guidelines can and do differ across languages. We also talked about the ways the English Wikipedia’s rules might differ from those of the French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese Wikipedias.
Psychology, physics and engineering instructors also came out for the workshop to hear the wrap up of Wiki Ed’s Year of Science. In addition, we talked about our upcoming Future of Facts campaign, where we hope to support politically relevant courses in areas like public policy, political science, law, history, sociology, and environmental science, as well as interdisciplinary courses that will work on these topic areas.
We’re excited to continue working with Tulane and other universities in the United States and Canada on subjects like these. Do you have an upcoming course that you feel could help improve Wikipedia as a source of factual, politically relevant information? If so, reach out to us at contact@wikiedu.org. I’d love to help you design your next assignment.
Photo: Campus (8555707272).jpg, by Tulane Public Relations, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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