Suggestions and Guidelines for Creating Wikipedia Assignments: Home

As a free encyclopedia, Wikipedia has no paywalls, which is why so many people around the world turn to it for information.  Its influence is vast; it has become one of the visited websites in the world.  By contributing new content or improving what is there, students can ensure the rigor and accuracy of Wikipedia, share knowledge with a global public, and develop their research and writing skills and areas of expertise.

If you plan to involve your students in editing or writing articles for Wikipedia, you should start with Wiki Education, which was founded in 2013 as a spinoff from the Wikimedia Foundation.  

Wiki Education sponsors a Student Program that works with colleges and universities in the United States and Canada by offering online, asynchronous tutorials geared to individual classes. These tutorials prompt students to think critically and constructively about Wikipedia – its strengths and weaknesses – while imparting nuts-and-bolts skills that show novices how to contribute.  
•    Wiki Education aims to widen the pool of volunteer editors so that they can fill content gaps and promote social equity through knowledge-sharing on Wikipedia and associated platforms, including Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
•    Wiki Education is a nonprofit organization and does not charge institutions for participating in its Student Program. Faculty must nevertheless apply a semester in advance by submitting a short proposal. You can find more information here: https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/

Wiki Education gives each class a “dashboard” which is more user-friendly – visually appealing and easier to navigate – than Wikipedia itself.

Educators enter class times, dates, and assignments in advance. The dashboard arranges the information in a timeline, which shows students what they need to do each week.  Short tutorials cover topics ranging from sourcing and citation to plagiarism.

Wiki Education’s tutorials are short and clear. Completing them, and doing associated tasks on Wikipedia, can be one small part of a course’s overall assignments.

The dashboard keeps track of students’ progress in completing tutorials and associated assignments. It also shows ongoing engagement with their work so students can see the real-world impact, including:

• Anonymized metrics which show how many words, citations, and media uploads members of the class have added to Wikipedia.
• How many members of the public have read the articles to which they contributed.

In practice, educators can also create assignments about Wikipedia and include them in the dashboard’s timeline. For example, an instructor could ask students to write a short “reaction-piece” essay analyzing an article (possibly chosen from a set of articles that that the instructor develops in advance, tailored towards course content) or more generally, reflecting on Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons free media repository

Learning to edit and write for Wikipedia supports a number of educational goals.

•  Skills in research, writing, and critical analysis of texts and images.  
• Information literacy by sharpening awareness of metadata, citation protocols, and copyright.  
• Consideration of tone in written expression and to reflect on the nature of neutrality and bias.  
• Experience in drafting and revision.
• Opportunities for teamwork and fostering camaraderie within the classroom. 

• Privacy and Usernames: Before the semester begins, and before students sign up for Wikipedia accounts, inform students that they may wish to protect their privacy by choosing usernames that do not reveal who they are.  
• This video from the Wikimedia Foundation offers some ideas
• Some guidelines about Wikipedia usernames also appear here
• Before and After: Engage students in class discussions at the beginning and end of the semester to solicit before-and-after impressions of Wikipedia, its culture, and its utility. The experience of writing for Wikipedia can change students’ perceptions of the platform, in both directions – with some becoming more convinced of its rigor, and others more skeptical.
• Appropriate Use of Wikipedia: Just because students write for Wikipedia does not mean that they should cite with Wikipedia!  Discuss appropriate uses of Wikipedia and set expectations early on about whether students can cite Wikipedia in research papers.  (Probably not!)  Discuss appropriate uses more than once: it needs repeating.  Many students seem to think that if they are writing for Wikipedia, and doing so to a high standard, then their instructors will be willing to have them cite Wikipedia as well.
• Join Your Students. Do the tutorials in tandem with your students, so that you remain attuned to where they are in the learning process and can address challenges that they are facing.
• Teamwork Is Fun.  Devote class time to teamwork – students enjoy it.  If you want to write a new article as a team, consider dividing students into small groups of 3 or 4 people and asking each to draft one paragraph or section.
• Do Not Expect the Students to Write a Lot. The process is likely to take longer than you think! If you manage as a class to publish one short new article on Wikipedia, that is a big accomplishment. For the sake of Wikipedia and its global community of users, prioritize quality over quantity.
• Working in Sandboxes.  Wikipedia has “sandboxes” where draft editing can occur.  However, in the early stages of writing, students may find it easier to draft or collect notes and sources in a Google Doc or another platform for sharing documents. You may want to use both – putting notes in a separate file and saving the Wikipedia sandbox for drafting text for an article.
• Talk and Walk through Some Edits Together. Students appreciate talking through edits, especially early in the semester. Find an article and devote 15 minutes to editing collectively in person. Correcting an error of punctuation or adding a citation will help students to build confidence as editors.  Many students have reported that they found “real-time” editing in class more instructive than doing online tutorials.
• Make Sure That Every Student Edits Something, Even If It Is Just Punctuation!  Some students are nervous about making live edits to Wikipedia.  Keep an eye on the Wiki Education class dashboard, which will show how much each student has contributed in terms of words added, references added, and (media) uploads. Make sure that every student does something.  If you dedicate some class time to Wikipedia teamwork, consider getting more experienced or confident users to help classmates who have not yet edited much or at all.  Even having a student correct punctuation in one sentence (and publish the change!) will develop their sense of know-how and their confidence.
• Watch Pages That You Edit.  Encourage students to click on the “Watch this page” box for articles that they edit.  (This option appears on Wikipedia when one goes to publish a change to an article). If other Wikipedians subsequently edit these articles, they will know, and can see how articles are works-in-progress. 
• Make it public. Finally, encourage students to publicize the work they do by sharing with friends and family.  It boosts their spirits and morale. 

1. Edit and improve existing articles, by making citations more robust, revising prose to improve the literary flow or neutrality, or expanding content.  
2. Conduct research, draft text, and publish a new article, working individually or in teams.
3. Insert images or other media files into Wikipedia articles, using materials from Wikimedia Commons that have Creative Commons licenses.
4. Upload an image to Wikimedia Commons (such as a photograph taken on a student’s cell phone of the campus) and generate appropriate captions (to enhance findability) along with a Creative Commons license (to ensure copyright compliance and allow for free use). Make sure that students understand what it means to release an image in this way.
5. Write a short reaction piece at the start of the semester, and another at the end of the semester, to show before-and-after assessments of Wikipedia’s strengths, weaknesses, and social or political dynamics.  

From the start of the semester, periodically incorporate Wikipedia into class discussions. Topics to consider may be:

• Information and misinformation
• Neutrality and bias
• Notability of people: what does it mean for Wikipedia, and who or what “deserves” or qualifies for an article?
• Plagiarism, copyright, and citation protocols
• Online privacy
• Strengths and gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage
• Appropriate uses of Wikipedia in the academic context

A discussion of copyright may align well with discussions about plagiarism, sourcing, and appropriate citation.  

Wikipedia has some distinctive policies about sources which are particularly relevant to scholars in humanities fields. Notably, it does not allow the citing of unpublished sources (such as archival records or manuscripts) or oral sources – materials which historians tend to think of as “gold.”

Finding and accurately adding citations that conform to Wikipedia’s protocols may have the advantage of prompting students to parse the metadata behind them.  

Consider requiring students to add a certain number of citations from refereed academic sources to Wikipedia articles. Make sure that they know how to insert both an “Automatic Citation” (using, for example, an ISBN number) and a “Manual Citation” (which will require them to insert appropriate metadata). Bonus: you can use this exercise as an excuse to show them how to search for materials through the university library’s catalogue.

Wikipedia allows instructors to encourage discussions about misinformation and bias. Wikipedia has structures to reduce the planting and propagation of fake information, including a wide network of anonymous volunteer editors, various “bots”, and mechanisms that allow contributors (including students) to monitor articles to which they contributed.  

Bias, by contrast, is harder to detect or root out, and is more subject to debate.  Educators can alert students to debates by assigning contentious articles that have been placed under “Active Arbitration Remedies” and on which editing has been restricted; students can read and analyze not only the public-facing article, but also the under-the-hood “Talk” page (visible to registered editors, as the students would be) where discussions about desirable or appropriate edits occur.  

Educators could also consider assigning academic articles or books about Wikipedia for students to read (and ideally, discuss as a group) in tandem with the individual, asynchronous online tutorials that the Wiki Education dashboard provides (see further reading tab).  A growing academic literature addresses the politics of representation on Wikipedia, its culture of editing, its international governance, and its relationship to information, misinformation, and digital citizenship.  Some articles address the “dark side” of Wikipedia, which includes edit wars and online bullying – all topics that can stimulate lively classroom debate