Building my Wikipedia confidence
Delia Steverson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at the University of Florida. Her classes work most closely with the WikiProject African diaspora. I assigned a Wikipedia project in the fall of 2019 to my honor’s undergraduate Gender and Sexualities in African American Literature course after several other colleagues mentioned the project’s … Continued
Wikipedia and public-facing scholarship in the classroom
Heather J. Sharkey has been working with undergraduate and graduate students on Wikipedia projects since 2019, with the goal of promoting public-facing scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Becoming a Wikipedian I started to write for Wikipedia less than two years ago, … Continued
Five best practices for Wikipedia assignments
Elyssa Faison has been assigning Wikipedia projects in both undergraduate and graduate classes since 2015. She is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma. When I was first approached several years ago by the Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Learning at my university about assigning a Wikipedia … Continued
A space to share psychological science — even psychological statistics
Viann N. Nguyen-Feng, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She serves as core faculty in the counseling/clinical track and directs the Mind-Body Trauma Care Lab. In late Fall 2019, I was doing my usual perusal of the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) e-newsletter with … Continued
Wikipedia editing in an upper-level biology elective
Heather Olins is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Biology Department and Environmental Studies Program at Boston College. Here she reflects on her student’s experience with Wikipedia editing in an upper level elective course, and adjustments she is making to the project in its second iteration. I teach a biology elective course called … Continued
Looking back at Fall 2019: engagement, service, and excitement
Wiki Education now regularly supports around 400 courses each term. With thousands of students adding millions of words to Wikipedia every academic year, you’d think we’d know everything there is to know about the Wikipedia assignment, from what it takes to be successful to what students get out of the project. But each term brings … Continued
Wikipedia as a teaching tool that empowers students
“I’ve improved my student reviews from it.” Dr. Jennifer Glass’ environmental geochemistry course at Georgia Tech last fall covered “how chemical, biological, and geological processes control the distribution of chemical elements on Earth and the solar system.” Through a semester-long Wikipedia writing assignment, she wanted students to gain experience “in scientific writing on notable topics … Continued
Teaching students that their words have power
“College professors tend not to allow you to include a Wikipedia article as a citation in a paper you write. So what are you doing encouraging your students to go to Wikipedia?” Houston Matters host Craig Cohen asked Dr. Melissa Weininger in a radio interview last week. “Well, I’m not encouraging them to go to … Continued
Trying something new in an already popular class
“I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years, but one statistic finally convinced me. … And this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper.” Dr. Stephennie Mulder at University of Texas at Austin decided to scrap the research paper for her Fall 2018 … Continued
Reading Wikipedia’s editorial culture
With three terms of Wikipedia writing assignment experience already under his belt, Dr. Josh DiCaglio reflects on having students understand Wikipedia’s editing culture by participating in it. He is an assistant professor in the department of English at Texas A&M University. Although many instructors have used Wikipedia in class projects, these assignments usually focus on … Continued