Teaching with Wikipedia
What’s Wikipedia?
Wikipedia shouldn’t work. How could a reliable Internet encyclopedia be created, expanded, and maintained by unqualified volunteers?
If you’re unfamiliar with Wikipedia, have a peek at it here: Wikipedia. At first glance, it’s a free, online encyclopedia. Search almost any term you could find in World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica, and there it is. Spend a little time with it, and you’ll realize that Wikipedia’s actually more comprehensive than Britannica, offering more than four times as many articles. Look at Brittanica online, and you’ll see another difference: after a trial period, Britannica costs 11.95 per month. Wikipedia is free.
Wikipedia had already become one of my regular resources when I discovered its real secret: anyone can add or edit any entry. Go ahead. Look at a topic with which you’re familiar, click the “Edit This Page” button, and change the entry. It’s that simple.
The whole encyclopedia, in fact, is just a collection of voluntary contributions. By anyone. No credentials required. It’s the equivalent of a library’s leaving an open notebook with these instructions: “If you know about something, please write it down.” If I see a mistake in Wikipedia, I can fix it. If I see an omission, I can fill in the gap.
Discovering the nature of Wikipedia soon brought out the cynic in me. Sometimes people believe themselves to be experts in an area, even if they aren’t. Some people have political axes to grind. Some might replace a meaningful entry with an offensive slur, just for kicks.
In fact, Wikipedia has all these problems, but none of them are insurmountable. People interested in an entry can elect to receive an automatic notification whenever anyone else edits that entry. Each time an arrogant pup posts some bad information about, say, high-speed trains, a more knowledgeable person is hot on his heels to correct the entry. Political topics are heavily debated (the entry for “abortion” has been revised more than 500 times in the past month), but Wikipedia warns readers with a label: “The neutrality of this article is disputed.” Wikipedia even seems to stand up well against vandalism. When a prankster adds a line to Henry David Thoreau’s entry claiming that he was Queen Elizabeth’s lover, a more serious scholar promptly reverts the change. In practice, the prankster seems to lose patience before the historian, and the valid entry stands.
Wikipedia for Composition Students
Once I was over my initial awe of Wikipedia, my mind turned to how it might be used as an educational tool.
Students can, and should, contribute to it. Wikipedia is still young, and it has room for thousands (millions?) of new topics. It has an entry on IPods, but doesn’t yet have one on MP3 radio recorders. It has an entry for baseball gloves, but no separate entry for first baseman’s mitts. It contains Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but not Donne’s Meditation XVII. It begs for expansion.
This points to an assignment in conjunction with research. A student who does a short research paper on the Washington Monument might well be able to add a line or two to its Wikipedia entry. A student who chooses a more esoteric topic, such as the coiling of ropes in eighteenth-century whaleboats, might well be able to add a whole new entry. If a student isn’t sure what to research, she might explore Wikipedia’s thousands of “stub” entries: topics that someone thinks ought to be represented, but which no one has written about as yet. (If you find something missing from Wikipedia, you can create a “stub” entry yourself.)
What’s wonderful about encouraging students to contribute to Wikipedia is that it offers an accessible, respected, worldwide, lasting forum for student publication. If a student’s contribution is worthwhile, it will likely stick, and she may browse back to it years hence, after thousands of people around the world have read it. Where else can a student’s writing have this sort of exposure?
If a student’s contribution is weak, of course, it is likely to be revised, deleted, or replaced in short order. That too would be a learning experience. I would like to see students make their contributions to Wikipedia fairly early in the term, so they could repeatedly look back at the topic and see firsthand what sorts of emendations occur. They could, in fact, engage in the editing process themselves, revising their own submissions as they think of improvements, and debating redactions they think inappropriate. Wikipedia not only gives students a chance to publish-it gives them a chance to edit and be edited.
Wikipedia for Teachers
In the Internet age, teachers are better able than ever to share ideas with each other. Several Wikipedia-like web pages for instructors have recently surfaced. These are repositories where anyone can post a lesson plan or a teaching strategy, and anyone else can enhance or edit it. Like Wikipedia, these web pages are fully searchable.
This, for example, is an existing resource, although it currently lacks the content and organized presentation of Wikipedia. Here is a proposal to start a site for teachers very similar to Wikipedia.
I see two problems with these pedagogic websites. One is a sort of balkanization: there are too many similar sites and no single, authoritative repository of teaching ideas. The other problem is that the total collection of ideas is still too small: not enough teachers have posted their strategies online. But Wikipedia has come a long way in four years, and I’ll be surprised if one day soon a teacher who needs to try a different approach or teach a new topic doesn’t turn first to an online resource.
Wikipedia shouldn’t work. How could a reliable Internet encyclopedia be created, expanded, and maintained by unqualified volunteers?
If you’re unfamiliar with Wikipedia, have a peek at it here: Wikipedia. At first glance, it’s a free, online encyclopedia. Search almost any term you could find in World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica, and there it is. Spend a little time with it, and you’ll realize that Wikipedia’s actually more comprehensive than Britannica, offering more than four times as many articles. Look at Brittanica online, and you’ll see another difference: after a trial period, Britannica costs 11.95 per month. Wikipedia is free.
Wikipedia had already become one of my regular resources when I discovered its real secret: anyone can add or edit any entry. Go ahead. Look at a topic with which you’re familiar, click the “Edit This Page” button, and change the entry. It’s that simple.
The whole encyclopedia, in fact, is just a collection of voluntary contributions. By anyone. No credentials required. It’s the equivalent of a library’s leaving an open notebook with these instructions: “If you know about something, please write it down.” If I see a mistake in Wikipedia, I can fix it. If I see an omission, I can fill in the gap.
Discovering the nature of Wikipedia soon brought out the cynic in me. Sometimes people believe themselves to be experts in an area, even if they aren’t. Some people have political axes to grind. Some might replace a meaningful entry with an offensive slur, just for kicks.
In fact, Wikipedia has all these problems, but none of them are insurmountable. People interested in an entry can elect to receive an automatic notification whenever anyone else edits that entry. Each time an arrogant pup posts some bad information about, say, high-speed trains, a more knowledgeable person is hot on his heels to correct the entry. Political topics are heavily debated (the entry for “abortion” has been revised more than 500 times in the past month), but Wikipedia warns readers with a label: “The neutrality of this article is disputed.” Wikipedia even seems to stand up well against vandalism. When a prankster adds a line to Henry David Thoreau’s entry claiming that he was Queen Elizabeth’s lover, a more serious scholar promptly reverts the change. In practice, the prankster seems to lose patience before the historian, and the valid entry stands.
Wikipedia for Composition Students
Once I was over my initial awe of Wikipedia, my mind turned to how it might be used as an educational tool.
Students can, and should, contribute to it. Wikipedia is still young, and it has room for thousands (millions?) of new topics. It has an entry on IPods, but doesn’t yet have one on MP3 radio recorders. It has an entry for baseball gloves, but no separate entry for first baseman’s mitts. It contains Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but not Donne’s Meditation XVII. It begs for expansion.
This points to an assignment in conjunction with research. A student who does a short research paper on the Washington Monument might well be able to add a line or two to its Wikipedia entry. A student who chooses a more esoteric topic, such as the coiling of ropes in eighteenth-century whaleboats, might well be able to add a whole new entry. If a student isn’t sure what to research, she might explore Wikipedia’s thousands of “stub” entries: topics that someone thinks ought to be represented, but which no one has written about as yet. (If you find something missing from Wikipedia, you can create a “stub” entry yourself.)
What’s wonderful about encouraging students to contribute to Wikipedia is that it offers an accessible, respected, worldwide, lasting forum for student publication. If a student’s contribution is worthwhile, it will likely stick, and she may browse back to it years hence, after thousands of people around the world have read it. Where else can a student’s writing have this sort of exposure?
If a student’s contribution is weak, of course, it is likely to be revised, deleted, or replaced in short order. That too would be a learning experience. I would like to see students make their contributions to Wikipedia fairly early in the term, so they could repeatedly look back at the topic and see firsthand what sorts of emendations occur. They could, in fact, engage in the editing process themselves, revising their own submissions as they think of improvements, and debating redactions they think inappropriate. Wikipedia not only gives students a chance to publish-it gives them a chance to edit and be edited.
Wikipedia for Teachers
In the Internet age, teachers are better able than ever to share ideas with each other. Several Wikipedia-like web pages for instructors have recently surfaced. These are repositories where anyone can post a lesson plan or a teaching strategy, and anyone else can enhance or edit it. Like Wikipedia, these web pages are fully searchable.
This, for example, is an existing resource, although it currently lacks the content and organized presentation of Wikipedia. Here is a proposal to start a site for teachers very similar to Wikipedia.
I see two problems with these pedagogic websites. One is a sort of balkanization: there are too many similar sites and no single, authoritative repository of teaching ideas. The other problem is that the total collection of ideas is still too small: not enough teachers have posted their strategies online. But Wikipedia has come a long way in four years, and I’ll be surprised if one day soon a teacher who needs to try a different approach or teach a new topic doesn’t turn first to an online resource.
posted by Michael Hardt | 8:22 AM
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