Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-09/Dispatches

The Wikipedia Signpost

Featured content from schools and universities

By Jbmurray, 5 May 2008

In short succession, two different university projects have shown strikingly different aspects to the relation between Wikipedia and education.

As reported in the Signpost on April 14, the Murder, Madness, and Mayhem project produced three featured articles, as well as eight good articles, over the course of a college semester. These included the very first example of featured content created as part of an educational assignment, an article on the Guatemalan novel El Señor Presidente, which was on the main page on May 5.

By contrast, the past few days have seen a rather less successful attempt to integrate Wikipedia into the college curriculum: as discussed at length at the Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, a professor teaching a class in Global Economics asked his students to upload their essays to the encyclopedia, but these have in the main been swiftly deleted, merged, or redirected. Of seventy newly-created articles, only seven have survived in anything like their original form, and only one (Organ trade) is free of cleanup tags.

Can future projects be more like the first of these two examples, and avoid the mistakes of the second?

History of educational projects on Wikipedia

These are not the first educational projects on Wikipedia, and they represent two extremes. Over the past five years, over seventy such initiatives have been registered at Wikipedia:School and university projects, from institutions as diverse as Yale University and the University of Tartu, Estonia, and on topics that range from immunology to Ancient Rome. There have probably been many other projects that have not been formally registered.

Advice and support for teachers and students is available from WikiProject Classroom Coordination. Two years ago, the Signpost reported that Wikipedia classroom assignments were on the rise, and the trend has only increased since.

Not all of these undertakings have aimed at producing featured content. Indeed, their structure and aims have varied significantly, and have included writing one article or many, and learning about "the chaos and joy of collaborative editing" as well as "becom[ing] familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource". There are surely many possible productive ways in which Wikipedia can aid student learning.

Writing featured content

But what can schools and universities contribute to Wikipedia? One of the encyclopedia's goals is to provide articles of professional quality, and featured articles are defined as "exemplif[ying] our very best work". The novelty of Murder, Madness, and Mayhem was that it set out deliberately to increase the number of featured articles. Could other schools and universities follow suit?

At the very least, there has to be some way of avoiding the debacle of multiple deletions, which in the case of the "Global Economics" uploads even led to brief talk of blocking an entire range of university IP addresses. As such reactions indicate, when the relationship between universities and Wikipedia misfires, it is perceived as disruption on Wikipedia; and surely the experience is equally frustrating for the instructor and his or her students.

Even with more successful initiatives, such as one from the University of Washington-Bothell that was featured on CNN among other major media outlets, the relationship is not always happy: as one news source summarized the experience, "Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues".

Both sides must do better. Discussing recent events, User:Noble Story declared "Maybe no school project will ever be able to emulate WP:MMM, but we can at least encourage them to try."

Keys to success

As coordinator of Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, I think there were a number of keys to that project's success. Many of them were fortuitous, and few of them were really novel. But most were simple and could easily be repeated. There is no reason why future projects could not emulate our success, and contribute articles that exemplify Wikipedia's best work on the one hand, as well as providing students with a rich and productive learning experience on the other.

• The instructor must have had prior experience with Wikipedia. That means experience as an editor, with all the frustrations as well as the rewards that that brings: having edits reverted and articles stuck with clean-up templates, for instance.
• The instructor must be willing to interact on Wikipedia as least as much as his or her students, and probably much more. The encyclopedia is a site of constant interaction and negotiation, and the instructor cannot simply hold back and expect students to "get on with it."
• The project should be registered with schools and universities projects, notes should be left with all the relevant WikiProjects and community noticeboards; and the project should be established as its own WikiProject, so that its goals and methods are transparent to the entire Wikipedia community.
• The assignment must be given time, probably an entire semester. All writing is in fact rewriting, but this is more evident on Wikipedia than anywhere else; and any featured article, or even good article, will have gone through scores, more likely hundreds, of revisions.
• The assignment's goals must be clear and compatible with Wikipedia's. "Original research" is highly prized in academia, but the genre of the encyclopedia prioritizes research and writing skills. The assignment should also take account of the state of existing articles, and not duplicate existing content.
• Students should be prepared to work with other people's text, revising and reworking stubs and start-class articles rather than thinking that their job is to start from scratch.
• Students should be prepared for others to work with their text, and they should negotiate with and take advantage of the fact that the encyclopedia is a collaborative environment.

To expand on the implications of this last point, here is a more controversial suggestion:

• Students should start immediately editing in main space, rather than working on their articles first either in user space or off-site, in some other mediawiki configuration. They will thereby learn Wikipedia conventions from day one, and can profit from the guidance (as well, perhaps, as the criticism) of other editors.

Given all the above, there is no reason why an educational assignment should not aim to produce featured content. It may still be unlikely that they will achieve this goal; I rewarded the contribution of a featured article with an A+ grade, which is hardly something a professor gives away, in recognition that this would be a difficult task.

Aiming for FA

There are, however, ways of making a difficult task at least a little easier. For a class to have a reasonable shot at producing a featured article, they should also bear in mind the following:

• Start early. It might be worth setting a Did you know ...? (discussed in last week's Dispatches) as an initial goal, to build momentum.
• Start with good sources. It's tempting to begin with what's easily available. But every piece of information that is cited to a poor source now will have to be re-sourced later on, doubling the amount of time and effort required.
• Start going to the library, even to its interlibrary loan department. User:Wasted Time R is only half-joking (if that) when he says in his advice for editing history articles: "Find source material that isn't on Google. You'll have the field to yourself." And that doesn't just go for History.
• Start with accurate references. Every time a citation is added, it should have full bibliographical details, with page number(s), and it should be clear what is directly cited and what is not. Again, every inaccuracy or confusion that creeps in now will have to be fixed later, more than doubling the amount and time of effort.

Finally, Murder, Madness, and Mayhem also had the immense advantage that early on in the process we attracted the attention of the FA-Team, a group of experienced editors dedicated to helping newer users bring their articles to featured status. Without them, we would never have achieved this arduous goal.

But it is no detraction from the FA-Team's efforts and dedication to wager that any organized group prepared to undertake the necessary primary research will attract the attention of other collaborators who will help out with advice, copy-editing, Manual of Style issues, and the like.

Even the articles that came out of the recent Global Economics project have all received an immense amount of attention and work. The amount of effort that has gone into providing feedback and advice has been quite extraordinary, not to mention the efforts to edit and format the articles themselves, to try and salvage something from an otherwise disappointing experiment.

Because it's worth it

On May 5, User:eecono, User:Mfreud, User:Katekonyk and the FA-Team saw their handiwork on Wikipedia's main page, a testament to their hard work. As Mfreud (Monica Freudenreich) says about the finished product:

Because I have worked so hard writing and re-writing it, I am extremely proud of the finished result. I almost can't believe I helped write it when I look back over it. Term papers I have handed back end up in a binder than eventually sits under my bed and files sit on my computer unopened ever again. This wikipedia page will be seen and likely used by others in the future. After all, I am quite confident that the references list is a comprehensive list of nearly everything published in English on the subject. Any student or person looking to read more about El Señor Presidente no longer has to look any further than our references list. Now that is something truly amazing!

In time, the principal contributors to Mario Vargas Llosa and The General in His Labyrinth hope to have the privilege of seeing their work, too, on the main page. As one of them commented as they responded to feedback generated in the Peer Review and Featured article candidates processes, knowing their classmates had already crossed the finish line, "Their FA star makes me soo jealous. But gives me motivation!"

We hope that all three MMM stars, as well as the excellent efforts made by the students who produced a whole crowd of new GA articles, can also give other school and university projects a bit of motivation.