Dr. Jason Todd’s students at Xavier University of Louisiana dramatically improved the Wikipedia article of their local town, saving the area from erasure in cultural memory. This is Dr. Todd on the impact of such an assignment. I tried incorporating Wikipedia into a writing class back in the spring of 2008, during my first year … Continued
Alliana Drury is a first year undergraduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In the Spring 2019 term, she took an English 101: Composition 1 course, taught by Dr. Matt Vetter and Teaching Assistant Oksana Moroz, and learned to contribute to Wikipedia as a major assignment in that course. In the following essay, she reflects … Continued
When the nature of an assignment leads to discovery, not simply to compliance, the learning becomes the students’ own. Dr. Gardner Campbell began teaching Wikipedia writing assignments at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. Here he shares the results that he says have “far exceeded” his expectations. For over two decades, from writing projects in freshman composition … Continued
Kitty Quintanilla is a second year medical student at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. Here, she shares why she’s passionate about increasing access to free information. Have you ever had your parents ramble at you about the “when I was young, we didn’t have all these computers and the internet and … Continued
Sarah Mojarad teaches a Social Media for Scientists and Engineers course at the University of Southern California where students write and improve Wikipedia articles as an assignment. Here, she shares her pedagogical motivations for doing so and the impact it has on students. “Chemistry is often elusive but Wikipedia helps to make chemistry topics, and … Continued
Since 2013, the UCSF School of Medicine has offered an elective course on editing health-related Wikipedia articles. The course is one month of full-time work, and is offered 2- 3 times each academic year. The following are reflections by Derek Smith, one student who enrolled in Dr. Amin Azzam’s March 2019 cycle of that course. I approached … Continued
Dr. Michael Rushing is an Associate Professor of Piano in the Department of Music at Mississippi College and taught a Wikipedia writing assignment for the first time last fall. Here, he describes how his students responded to putting their hard work out on a world stage. In the Fall of 2018, two students in a … Continued
Trudi Jacobson is Head of the Information Literacy Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. Here, she explains how she wove a Wikipedia writing assignment together with the six frameworks of information literacy. This course not only taught me how to write on Wikipedia, which by the way I always thought was the coolest concept, … Continued
Eilene Lyon is a Colorado-based freelance writer specializing in historical non-fiction, and an avid genealogist. Eilene learned how to create and expand Wikipedia articles in our professional development course as a way to give back to society and ensure that accurate information is being presented in a well-written format. This is a republishing of her … Continued
