Jane Sancinito is Assistant Professor of History at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is an ancient historian, focusing on merchants, artisans and working people in the Roman Empire, a numismatist, studying ancient coinage, and a specialist in the concept of greed in the pre-modern world.
I never considered myself much of a Wikipedia editor. I had made a few corrections in graduate school, adding a reference here or there, but I never learned how the templates worked and creating a new article was out of the question. Still, when a friend invited me to an Editathon for Women in Red, I went along to help out, and it immediately hit me, halfway through an article on an artist I’d never heard of before: wouldn’t this make a great class project? Something research-based for a survey course, potentially lighter than a term-paper, but a way for students to take over, display mastery, and maybe even get scrappy in the talk pages. Wouldn’t that be fun?
At the time, I was a postdoc. I was, and still am, an ancient historian, and I wasn’t sure if my senior colleagues would sign off on my making the leap to a digital project, to doing something experimental. I still remembered my high school teachers complaining about students and Wikipedia, and, while I thought it would work, I couldn’t be sure if others would see the vision. Maybe after tenure, I thought, when no one is looking over my shoulder, when I don’t have to worry about what others think. Maybe.
The pandemic, understandably, changed everything. The internet was suddenly the only option, and I, shockingly, was newly hired on the tenure track. I had a new campus, new colleagues, and new classes to be taught completely online. Like so many others, I was reinventing the wheel in real time when I discovered the nonprofit Wiki Education and their support for Wikipedia assignments. Their Dashboard, a system that integrates with Wikipedia, enables faculty to assign students articles to edit, provides trainings and exercises, explains Wikipedia’s standards, and, holy grail of holy grails, provides a weekly syllabus and tracks student edits. It was perfect, and I rolled it out in the fall of 2020 in the first class I ever taught in my new job: Ancient Greek History. That fall, my class edited 33 articles on a wide range of Ancient Greek ideas, people, events, and concepts. A student worked on ancient calendars, another on a Hellenistic king, another on a play by Euripides.
It was an incredibly popular assignment, and students mentioned it in my evaluations. They liked the element of choice and enjoyed learning how Wikipedia actually works. I’ve repeated the project twice more since 2020, even after I returned to the physical classroom, because it continues to lend itself to the kind of pedagogy I want to practice. With Wikipedia, I have a natural reason to discuss sources and credibility, to introduce concepts like peer review and the kinds of verification practiced by historians. I give a lesson on the tone and voice of encyclopedias, and why Wikipedia, and not an academic journal, is generally the first port of call for people with simple, factual questions. Lately, we have been discussing why Wikipedia matters, and continues to matter, in the age of AI, and how human information fundamentally differs from, and underpins, large language models. Like the basis of most good discussions, the topics sit perfectly on the fence between things I know they need to learn and things they are already thinking about.
I never would have guessed how well it would work. I wasn’t a Wikipedia editor. I knew little more than my students did when I started and, to this day, I still don’t consider myself an expert, but others increasingly do. I’ve since run workshops on editing Wikipedia and introduced many others to the Wiki Education platform. I wear many hats in this job, but “Wikipedia lady,” is one I bear with more joy than most others, if only because everyone else seems to be enjoying it too. Students continue to check in on “their” pages after they leave my class, and they tell me when they make other edits. As a community of editors, we’ve also created pages for historical figures, artists, and notable community members, and, while there is always pizza, there is also always a crowd with questions and ideas.
It has added up into a strange but persuasive collection of activities. As I sat down to write my tenure narrative this fall, my case for why I should be awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor, I thought of my students, my classes, the pandemic and AI, and… Wikipedia. I don’t use it in every course I teach, but when I do it serves to support the core of my pedagogical philosophy. Working with Wikipedia is one of the ways I teach information literacy, historical truth as a generative, iterative, and collaborative practice, and the ethical responsibility we have, as experts and experts in training, to convey what we learn to others in clear, concise, real-world language. Once I realized that, well, writing the narrative wasn’t that difficult. I had the examples I needed and even quantitative data to back up my claims. I claim that I am a good teacher; Wikipedia is my case in point.
The tenure process is ongoing, I’ll have a final answer sometime next summer because the wheels of the Academy grind slow and fine, but I know my portfolio stands out because of the gamble I took on Wikipedia. I also know that by every metric available, that gamble has paid off, for me and, far more critically, for my students. It’s a gamble I would recommend and, as I tell everyone, it is far easier than it may initially sound. My survey courses edit Wikipedia. They add thousands of words and dozens of citations to articles of all shapes and sizes every semester. They are Wikipedia editors, every one, and I couldn’t be more proud of what they’ve accomplished.
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.
