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Every system has its biases, and Wikipedia is no exception. A common criticism of Wikipedia is its male bias. Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agreed with the criticism after it conducted a 2011 survey indicating that up to 90% of editors identified as male. This is a problem for a non-profit organization whose mission is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content … and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

The mechanisms for the gender bias are various, complex, and the subject of several studies, recently summarized by two New York researchers. They may include the code-heavy interface, called wiki markup, that contributors initially had to use to edit articles. To the extent that wiki markup operated to inhibit female editors, the technical hurdle has largely disappeared: since April 2015, Wikipedia’s VisualEditor is available by default on the Article pages (but not the Talk pages) for about three-quarters of the language editions of Wikipedias. A more troubling and persistent concern may be Wikipedia’s sometimes hostile user culture, which I’ll discuss in a future blog post. In response to these concerns, there has been a series of efforts to increase female editorship. These include edit-a-thons, some organized by Wikimedia Foundation and some independently, to increase coverage of women’s topics in Wikipedia and to encourage more women to edit it. An example is the worldwide Art+Feminism edit-a-thon, the third of which was held last year to coincide with International Women’s Day. Events took place in nine locations across Canada, including Saskatoon, where editors focused on Saskatchewan and Indigenous women artists including Ruth Cuthand, Mary Longman, and Michelle LaVallee. Similar events are planned for the US, Canada and Europe in March 2017.

Educators and their students can help address the bias. In 2012, students in Alana Cattapan’s fourth-year seminar, “The Politics of the Canadian Women’s Movement,” edited, updated, and expanded various Wikipedia articles, including “Feminism in Canada.” Though often serving as a first point of reference on Canadian feminism, this Wikipedia page was underdeveloped, and Cattapan drew on her students to set about correcting this gateway article and other related ones. Librarians have also been active. In September 2016, to celebrate Science Literacy Week, Concordia University Library partnered with McGill Library to host a Women in Science Wikipedia event. The librarians gave a tutorial on how to edit Wikipedia, followed by an editing session in which participants got one-on-one help.

If you’re thinking of wading into the field and wondering where to start, you might want to look at WikiProject Women in Red. The goal of this project is to turn “red links”—internal links that lead to Wikipedia pages that don’t exist—into “blue links”—internal links that lead to actual Wikipedia articles. (More on this later.) Or if you’d rather start by having your students edit existing material, check out the contrapuntally-named Wikiproject Women in Green, an attempt to bring articles on women up to minimum “Good article” status. The project even provides a “Hot 99” list of women’s biographies to get you started—ranging from Aisha to Natalie Wood.

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John Kleefeld is an associate professor at the College of Law and a 2017 teaching fellow at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, where he is coordinating a campus-wide project on integrating Wikipedia assignments into course materials. Portions of this blog series are from an article that he and a former law student wrote about using a Wikipedia assignment for class credit. See J. Kleefeld and K. Rattray, 2016. “Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?” Journal of Legal Education, 65:3, 597-621.

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In previous posts, I argued for the benefits of having students edit or write Wikipedia articles for university credit. But if “anyone can edit,” doesn’t that make Wikipedia prone to errors, questionable content, edit wars, and vandalism? Well, yes—these things comprise Wikipedia’s dark side and can compromise efforts at using Wikipedia for student learning. For example, Sivan Lerer, mentioned in my first post, found that when her students edited Bahá’í articles that already had substantial content, they “had a difficult time merging what they wanted with what it said in the entry,” resulting in other Wikipedians undoing their edits. But even this phenomenon can be turned into experiential learning. In “Using Wikipedia to Teach Audience, Genre and Collaboration,” Allan Bilansky, who uses Wikipedia in his social informatics course, says that “an informed effort at making contributions that persist within a large community … can be an experience at being answerable to a real audience.” Responding to a student who reported that he “had made a change [to a Wikipedia article], and then it changed back,” Bilansky told the student, “it did not change back;” rather, “[s]omeone changed it back, probably for reasons we can eventually understand.”

In both theory and practice, though, Wikipedia isn’t the freewheeling editing environment that you might think it is. Wikipedia adheres to some key principles, called the five pillars: (i) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia—not a blogging forum, a social networking site, a place to publish original research, or a dictionary (but see its companion lexical project, Wiktionary); (ii) articles adopt a neutral point of view, which includes “document[ing] and explain[ing] the major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone;” (iii) Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute, so anything that smacks of using Wikipedia for commercial gain attracts censure; (iv) Wikipedia has a code of conduct, or “Wikiquette,” that requires editors to treat each other with civility; and (v) Wikipedia has no firm rules, which means that “principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions.”

These principles are fleshed out in specific policies and practices. For example, a Wikipedia article should abide by three core content policies: neutral point of view (NPOV), verifiability (V), and no original research (NOR). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, after all, which means that it is entirely derivative from other works. Thus, Wikipedians are alert to articles or edits that lack citations to reliable, published sources. Not uncommonly, articles are peppered with “citation needed” admonitions inserted by watchful Wikipedians, or prefaced by warnings that the article may violate NPOV, V, or NOR and be a candidate for deletion. Yet the civility principle means that Wikipedians must be judicious with deletions or other edits. This exhortation takes practical shape in the form of rules like the “three-revert rule”: an editor may not make more than three reversions to an article on a single page—whether involving the same or different material—within a 24-hour period.

To help students imbibe these principles and rules, Bilansky created some innovative assign­ments for his social informatics course. For example, the first assignment required students to read the View History pages (also called page history, revision history or edit history) and Talk pages (also called discussion pages) of Wikipedia articles. Every article has these pages, though most users are probably only faintly aware of them. The page history lists all the article’s previous revisions, including date and time (in UTC) of each edit, the editor’s registered username or IP address, and the user’s edit summary. As Bilansky explains, these features amount to a sort of variorum edition of each article: not only do they preserve every contributor’s minutest work and let you compare two different versions, they also provide opportunities for learning about collaborative writing processes and academic research standards.

The first thing that each of Bilansky’s students had to do was find a Wikipedia article with at least one edit that didn’t persist (that is, changes made by one editor were reverted by another), review the version history, and post to a class discussion thread an explanation of why the edits they examined were undone. (Finding such an article merely requires searching for the word reverted in the revision history.) Bilansky offered prizes for the first student to find a Wikipedia policy cited on a Talk page, which created quite a buzz and an interest in finding more strange-sounding policies or prohibitions, like the endearingly named “sock puppetry” (using multiple user accounts to hide one’s tracks). All this preparatory work smoothed the way for more complex assignments, resulting in engagement on Talk pages and in some cases, collaboration with senior Wikipedia editors (all volunteers—the whole encyclopedia is a volunteer effort) who helped the students navigate their way through what can seem like terra incognita.

I will return to the theme of Wikipedia’s integrity, because there is a lot to say about it. But in my next post, I will consider another critique of Wikipedia—its documented male bias—and what instructors and students are doing about it.

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John Kleefeld is an associate professor at the College of Law and a 2017 teaching fellow at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, where he is coordinating a campus-wide project on integrating Wikipedia assignments into course materials. Portions of this blog series are from an article that he and a former law student wrote about using a Wikipedia assignment for class credit. See J. Kleefeld and K. Rattray, 2016. “Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?” Journal of Legal Education, 65:3, 597-621

 

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In my last blog post, I wrote about the wide range of disciplines represented in student Wikipedia projects. Perhaps the most ambitious effort is the Wiki Project Med Foundation, whose goal is nothing less than “to provide the sum of all medical knowledge to all people in their own language.” Started by Wikipedia enthusiast and UBC clinical professor James Heilman, the foundation is working to this goal by collaborating with various partners. These include the closely allied WikiProject Medicine, the non-profit organization Translators Without Borders, and University of California San Francisco, where fourth-year medical students have been editing Wikipedia for credit in a month-long elective course since 2013.

Amin Azzam, associate clinical professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, found that Wikipedia was second only to Google as the most frequently used source by junior physicians (!) but that there was a clear need to bring medical articles up to par. As he explains in a 2014 interview, he and his collaborators prioritized Wikipedia’s medical articles based on the number of unique visitors to the articles and the importance of the articles from a health perspective. Wikipedia also has a system for ranking article quality, ranging from “stub” to “featured article,” and the collaborators found that many articles were at the low end of the quality scale. Azzam encouraged his students to focus on the intersection of these two—high priority but low quality—and direct their efforts to improving them. Most students picked articles from this list, such as Cirrhosis and Hepatitis, while some pursued articles that held a special interest for them, like “Race and health.” Not only did they edit their chosen articles, but they reviewed articles edited by their class peers. The results, presented at a 2015 medical education conference, were impressive. As measured by Wikipedia’s own quality metrics, the students’ work resulted in improvements to most of the selected articles, and significant improvements to several.^[1]

Not only has this work continued to the present, with over 50 articles improved through student work, but UCSF’s School of Pharmacy has recently joined forces with the medical school: Tina Brock, professor and associate dean of Global Health & Educational Innovations, now assigns third-year pharmacy students articles to edit from Wiki Project Pharmacology, an initiative like WikiProject Medicine. In the meantime, the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University has also taken up the initiative. In a recent paper in Education Information Technology, educators Shani Evenstein Sigalov and Rafi Nachmias explain how their students have edited over 128 medical articles in Hebrew Wikipedia, already viewed over 1.4 million times. The paper also presents findings of a related study that focused on students’ learning experience, long-term impact and productive teaching practices.

“But surely” you might ask, “doesn’t Wikipedia’s ‘anyone can edit philosophy’ mean that all this good work can be undone?” I’ll take up that question in my next post.

^[1]  Articles that went from “start class” or “C-class” to “B-class” in the first session can be considered to have improved significantly. According to the hyperlinked study, the following articles would qualify as such: “Hepatitis,” “Diabetes,” “Amyloidosis,” “Cholecystitis,” “Toxic epidermal necrolysis,” “Placental abruption,” “Therapeutic hypothermia,” “Premature rupture of membranes,” “Umbilical cord prolapse” and “Omphalitis of newborn.”

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John Kleefeld is an associate professor at the College of Law and a 2017 teaching fellow at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, where he is coordinating a campus-wide project on integrating Wikipedia assignments into course materials. Portions of this blog series are from an article that he and a former law student wrote about using a Wikipedia assignment for class credit. See J. Kleefeld and K. Rattray, 2016. “Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?” Journal of Legal Education, 65:3, 597-621.

 

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This blog has been updated to correct some initial errors.

A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of Wikipedia. And while there was a time when all the old powers would have entered into an alliance to exorcise this spectre, a worldwide community of educators is now taking a radically different approach: they’re assigning students the task of editing and writing Wikipedia’s sprawling content, and giving them academic credit for doing so. In the process, they’re turning students from indiscriminate knowledge consumers to savvy knowledge creators. At the same time, they’re building an open-access and up-to-date storehouse of knowledge that, in certain areas, already rivals traditional reference works. As Clay Shirky explains, this is all part of an interconnected movement—from wikis to open textbooks to interactive mapping applications like Ushahidi—in which technology has made possible methods of collaboration that never existed before.

How did this start? For some instructors, it came from a place of despair. So it was for Sivan Lerer, who teaches an introductory course on the Bahá’í Faith at Hebrew Jerusalem University. In an interview published in December 2016, Lerer explains:

I’ve told my students, for many years, that despite its many advantages (it’s accessible and in Hebrew), Wikipedia’s not an academic source . . . I told them they can use Wikipedia in the beginning but afterwards they have to go to the Encyclopedia of Islam, or The Encyclopedia of Religions. But all my admonitions were in vain. They used only Wikipedia as their source.

Lerer also wasn’t happy with the quality of writing in her students’ exams, finding that in many of their answers, they would just “regurgitate” her lectures. Sound familiar? That’s when she learned about the education program of Wikimedia Israel, whose goals are to cultivate deeper student learning and improve the access to, and quality of, Wikipedia’s resources. With the help of education coordinator Shai Katz and Darya Kantor, an active “Wikimedian,” Lerer redesigned her course to incorporate Wikipedia assignments, from revising existing articles to adding new material, such as a Canadian student’s article on the Bahá’í community in Canada. Altogether, 18 students created or improved 17 articles in Hebrew Wikipedia, with Lerer concluding that it was a positive experience for the students, and that “[i]nstead of memorizing, they really learned.”

Students have now contributed to Wikipedia as part of their course work in agriculture and life sciences, chemistry, community history, geobiology, linguistics, mineralogy, psychology, public policy, and a host of other fields. In March 2016, Wiki Edu’s Eryk Salvaggio, who writes a blog for the Wiki Education Foundation set out five reasons why you might consider assigning such a project instead of a term paper. It’s not hard to do, but before getting into the nuts and bolts of it, we’ll look at some examples of what others are doing. In particular, I want to tell you about some medicine professors who, with their students’ help, are now editing Wikipedia to make high-quality medical knowledge freely available around the world.

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John Kleefeld is an associate professor at the College of Law and a 2017 teaching fellow at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, where he is coordinating a campus-wide project on integrating Wikipedia assignments into course materials. Portions of this blog series are from an article that he and a former student wrote about using a Wikipedia assignment for class credit. See J. Kleefeld and K. Rattray, 2016. “Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?” Journal of Legal Education, 65:3, 597-621.