3.2.1 Wikipedia assignments
We have all probably told students some variation of the following, “Do not use Wikipedia as a credible source, it can be edited by anyone on the internet!”. The open collaboration framework of Wikipedia means that contributions are not vetted or monitored by an official entity and adherence to community guidelines coupled with reliance on multiple contributors, creates wariness as to its validity. However, it is exactly this open nature of Wikipedia that has allowed instructors to harness the power of Wikipedia to provide rich educational experiences. In 2013, the Wiki Education Foundation (Wiki Ed) was created with the mission to “engage students and academics to improve Wikipedia, enrich student learning and build a more informed public.” (https://wikiedu.org/mission-and-vision/). This organization provides free resources and serves as a bridge for instructors wanting to incorporate writing or editing of Wikipedia content into their classrooms.
A major draw to Wikipedia assignments is the ease with which they can target higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) and the specific core competencies detailed in the BioCore (Brownell et al, 2014) and BioSkills Guide (Clemmons et al, 2020). Assignments that involve the assessment, editing and contribution of content to the Wikipedia platform also tackle a host of the core concepts and competencies detailed in Vision and Change (AAAS, 2011; 2015; 2018). Wikipedia assignments can be as large and broad as the instructor chooses. For example, students can be asked to create new Wikipedia articles from scratch, to edit existing articles, or to translate existing content into another language. As per guidance from the Wiki Ed team, these assignments could span a few weeks to a full term (https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/). Additionally, these assignments are highly compatible with courses in Ecology and Evolution because of the broad availability of article types that instructors and students can choose to edit.
For Wikipedia assignments, all work is completed through a Wiki Education Dashboard. The Wiki Education branch of Wikipedia builds course dashboards, offers assignment design guidance, provides staff support for students, and offers online trainings, all free of charge. The staff also supports instructors and students throughout the duration of the course. In-line with scientific teaching and backwards design, instructors should target Wikipedia content based on course learning objectives and the BioCore guide (i.e. Figure 3 in Brownell et al, 2014) and the BioSkill guide (Clemmons et al, 2020). The Wiki Ed staff work with instructors to facilitate the creation and structure of a course dashboard and to make assignments directly compatible with the BioSkills Guide and Bloom’s taxonomy, thus facilitating implementation and execution of Wikipedia assignments (https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/). A sample dashboard from H. Schutz’s spring 2019 course can be found here:https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/Pacific_Lutheran_University/Comparative_Anatomy_(Spring_2019). Additionally, all course and campaign dashboards can be viewed at Wiki Ed (https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/explore). It may be particularly helpful to search for ecology or evolution course dashboards for instructors to see examples of course design and for students to see working examples of their assignment outcomes (Kilpatrick et al, 2020). To create a dashboard, instructors should contact Wiki Education staff, using the form on the webpage, at least one month prior to the start of their course.
Students engaged in Wikipedia assignments via the Wiki Education Foundation program begin with comprehensive training and small tasks. Students are encouraged to draft all of their work in their account sandboxes, pages that are publicly accessible but designated as drafting spaces. Their first assignments involve evaluation as they review existing articles for readability, grammar and accuracy and assess the quality of sources based on their training via the dashboard and instructor guidance. Learning to discriminate between sources based on their reliability and quality and identifying and correcting plagiarism via a hands-on evaluative and iterative process is part of the Wikipedia training and assignments. Before ever beginning to edit content, students engage with anyone editing or monitoring the article to discuss proposed changes. Students review, comment on, and suggest changes to existing Wikipedia article entries in the article talk pages (a component of every Wikipedia article where editors discuss changes and updates to a page). Students then begin to draft content and continue in evaluation mode throughout the semester. They also peer review the work of other students. Students formulate revisions and plans based on peer, instructor, and Wiki Education staff feedback (this all happens in their sandboxes before going live). After engaging with students and other Wikipedia editors at large (anyone, anywhere can edit Wikipedia at any time and can engage with students) in the talk pages, students often find support for their proposed changes and execute them on the actual article page. As they begin to create content, students must break down complex ideas, often from the primary literature, and then integrate, organize, and convey this content to a broad audience. All of these elements are deeply compatible with the Communication and Collaboration elements in BioSkills. Additionally, educating students about plagiarism improves their capacity to identify it (Holt, 2012). Because students actively search for and correct plagiarism (as is done in the Wikipedia assignment described above), their efficacy and competence in avoiding plagiarism is much greater than if they simply read about it or participated in an online training about plagiarism (Holt et al, 2014).
Writing is one of the primary media used in Wikipedia assignments and is consistently associated with increased student engagement (Camfield and Land, 2017). In particular, the use of iterative assignments that begin early, start simply, build on one another and focus on the synthesis and summary of ideas and include peer review can create deep learning of content via communication of diverse and complex ideas (Balgopal et al, 2018), Building on low-stakes activities stimulates student engagement and builds self-efficacy (Sawyer et al, 2017; Camfield et al, 2020). Additionally, the knowledge that their work potentially reaches large and diverse audiences drives student’s engagement and motivation (Konieczny, 2016).
Working with students on Wikipedia not only allows instructors to target concepts and competencies, but it can also be a way for increasing inclusivity in a course because many of the inclusive teaching strategies discussed above are compatible with Wikipedia assignments and the dashboards accompanying a course. The assignments are hands-on and active, as students are authors to all changes. Instructors can guide students to articles for editing or development, but often students propose their own articles to edit and they do so as part of small teams, consequently the effort is primarily student-led. Allowing students to choose their own entry to the content and assignment is in-line with UDL principles. The dashboards are designed to provide significant structure for students and are completely customizable, therefore making incorporation of TILT and UDL principles easier. The Wikipedia guides for best practices also invite students to produce a reflective piece at the end of their contributions which asks them to reflect on what they learned about how Wikipedia works, how peer review worked for them, how they reacted to feedback, and how they were treated by the broader Wikipedia community. Most importantly, it asks students to reflect on the impact of their contributions. This portion is one of the most powerful pieces of the reflection because course dashboards track the number of edits made, number of references added, number of media uploads and the number of article views for the duration of the course. Students are often pleasantly shocked at the amount of traffic their articles receive and therefore the significant readership they have the capacity to reach.
Working with students on Wikipedia does have some pitfalls that should be considered and addressed. Wikipedia is a community-built Encyclopedia and thus anyone can contribute via adding, editing, or deleting content at any time. Most editors, the people doing the bulk of contributing, editing, and gatekeeping of posted information, are white cis-gendered males and content often has significant ingroup bias (Oeberst et al, 2019). Content also contains both race and gender gaps (see Xing and Vetter, 2020 for a full review) as well as gender bias (see Wagner et al, 2015 for a review). These issues not only affect content quality, but also generate very real concerns about online safety and comfort that has resulted in some Wikipedia editors who identify as women to leave the space (Menking et al, 2019). In the context of a course, instructors can mitigate some of these effects by suggesting that students use gender neutral account names that are not tied to their identities. Additionally, articles linked to a Wikipedia course dashboard are flagged as such and Wikipedia editors are encouraged to behave generously with new student editors.
In the last decade, the Wiki Education Program’s partnerships with instructors across disciplines to facilitate teaching with Wikipedia has resulted in a significant surge of student editors that diversify the editorial population by their very presence. Of the general Wikipedia editor population only 20% identify as women, whereas 68% of student editors do (Wiki Education, 2020https://wikiedu.org/changing/wikipedia/). Students diversify content either as part of their assignments or participation in various editing projects or a combination of both (Montez, 2017; Xing and Vetter, 2020). Students can engage in the Science and Society competencies as Wikipedia assignments can include elements from the Women in Red project which aims to address the gender gap in Wikipedia entries or the recent #HackforBlackLives event aimed to improve Wikipedia content on Black academics and issues of social justice. Additionally, much like with group work, diverse Wikipedia teams often produce higher quality content than more homogenous ones (Sydow et al, 2017; Lerner and Lomi, 2018).