Tona Hangen is a professor of history at Worcester State University. She incorporated a Wikipedia assignment into her course for the first time last term.
For over a decade I have taught a history and political science course on American citizenship that coincides with the fall election season in even-numbered years. In my usual version, students wrote concise research papers posted to a public-facing website (one which, it must be admitted, garners negligible page views). So I already had oriented the course slightly towards student work designed to engage with the general public, away from the kind of final assignment destined to sit in my learning management system’s gated garden forever, likely not even retrieved by its own author. Joining Wiki Education for Fall 2024 and having my 20 students live-edit Wikipedia articles, I suspected, could be a better way of achieving course goals of having students see the relevance of their research in real time, with authentic stakes.
My students (and I) definitely found a Wikipedia-editing project challenging. Before the class began I selected about 40 course-related articles rated S or C class from which to choose, but they varied greatly in length, complexity, and research potential. There is a steep learning curve to navigating Wikipedia’s editing platform, even though Wiki Education’s tutorials are well-designed to guide students through the basics and get them editing confidently. I had to consider how much class time to devote to project instruction, debriefing, and troubleshooting, reducing some instructional time on other topics. Only a few students easily found scholarly reference material or saw immediate ways to improve their article, while others kept digging but couldn’t find many new sources or and got stuck on how to change what was already there.
Grading posed its own difficulties, which came up frequently in the weekly office hours held by the Wiki Education team. How could I standardize performance expectations when the articles were themselves so different? How would students know they were “done”? Would I grant an equivalent grade to those who added references or images vs. those who rearranged section text vs. those who cleaned up jargon? If I wasn’t grading on word count, number of sources added, or longevity of edits, then what, precisely, were students being evaluated on? Especially as a first-timer, I found it helpful to talk with other instructors working through these issues. Focusing more on process and progress – evaluated partly by weekly journals and how well they stayed on track with the project schedule – rather than final product quality, resolved some (but not all) of the grading concerns. The dashboard is extremely well-designed both for student users and for faculty instructors, giving me clear access to their work and allowing progress-tracking throughout the semester.
Despite these struggles, my students “got” the assignment in ways that were truly invigorating. For many of them Wikipedia had been a taboo source, one they’re not allowed to cite in college papers and had been actively steered away from in the past – yet one they all used regularly, sometimes guiltily. This project made them better users of the site, as it introduced them to the community of Wikipedians and their robust editorial policies, all of which was invisible to them before. Their audience became clearer: they weren’t writing just for their professor, but for general readers like themselves. Contributing to articles on voting rights, immigration law and citizenship requirements – in an election year, no less – lent urgency and importance to their work.
In reflective essays at the end of the project, my students expressed genuine pride in what they’d accomplished. 14 out of 18 respondents gave themselves an A or B grade, citing specific improvements to their article and describing the level of effort, time, and care they put into the project (I will note I tended to concur with those self-assessments!). Through class peer review and feedback they got from fellow Wikipedia editors, they got a better grasp on the collaborative nature of knowledge, as comments like these attest:
“I also realized that people present information in different ways. Large projects like this one highlight that including a variety of perspectives makes the information richer and more meaningful, allowing us to share different insights on important topics.”
“I thought that you could just add any information on Wikipedia and that it was easy to put in false information on the platform but after seeking the rules and expectations Wikipedia has, I realized its sole focus is for others to share together on important topics. It is a great way for minds to come together.”
“I had to make sure to provide information directly from the source without injecting anything I thought or bias into it, even subconsciously. It was genuinely a great learning experience in that regard. Even beyond learning about Wikipedia itself, this project serves as a great thought exercise to really probe your mind and contemplate how you process and regurgitate information.”
“I would say I learned a lot more about the process of research than the actual research topic itself as it was pretty straightforward … The overall process of understanding the topic to finding credible sources that you have to make sure to insert very specifically according to the guidelines was definitely intensive.”
“I definitely feel better suited for research projects in the future after this, as I feel I’ve learned the importance of adjusting your scope in research as well as prioritizing credible sources.”
I asked my students if I should repeat this project the next time I taught the course. I fully expected the class would tell me it was a good one-time experiment. Instead, I was amazed to see 17 of the 18 respondents said Yes or Maybe to that survey question.
“Being able to see edits and the community working firsthand, along with how deeply they look into edits and sources, has been a great way to understand how one of the largest websites in the world functions. It would be great if more students, and people in general, could see this firsthand and understand this… I will genuinely go forward having much more faith in Wikipedia, along with being able to check sources when I’m skeptical, and plan to tell others about this exact thing. Overall it might be worth further experimenting how to go about it, but I’d rate the project 8/10 and can certainly say I learned something important to apply to real life from it.”
“I loved this project, it felt like we did more than just a final project. We did something to help more people and if we continue to be passionate about this type of work we can continue to work on it moving forward.”
“The project was crucial in the improvement of our analytical and professional writing skills. I enjoyed [peer review] as it provided me with a strong foundation of suggestions I should always apply to my writing. It was awesome to contribute to academic content on the internet.”
“This was out of my comfort zone for assignments since it took learning a whole new system … I felt hesitant to add information and contribute as much as I could because I was conscious of, ‘is this the wrong thing to add’ or ‘if I take this part out will affect how the reader understands the article,’ but overall the assignment was interesting and it took learning a topic to a whole new level.”
The students in Citizen Nation at Worcester State University in Fall 2024 edited 19 articles. They added 9.65K new words (many of which are still there as of this writing), 115 new references (most from academic database references), and have gotten 288k article views. The possibilities – and results – of adapting my standard research project into a Wiki Education collaboration exceeded all my expectations this term. I’m sure I’ll be back, in the next U.S. election cycle.
-Tona Hangen, Professor of History, Worcester State University
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.
