Wikipedia and the FYE

Almost a year ago, I was attending a two-day “retreat” (i.e., meeting) for the Colorado College First Year Experience (FYE). This is an annual event where the faculty who will be teaching the FYE in the next academic year exchange ideas with each other, as well as librarians, writing center staff, and other college staff that support teaching and learning.

At some point in a small group conversation, the topic turned to Wikipedia; how Wikipedia citations in student papers were frustrating because they indicated that students didn’t understand issues of authority or appropriate sources in academic writing, or that it simply indicated that the student’s research went no further than the first page of results from Google.

We talked about whether it made sense to simply forbid students to cite Wikipedia (as Middlebury’s history department would do some months later). I said that while I was sympathetic to profs that would ban the site from student research, I said that I also thought that faculty could be missing out on a great opportunity to use Wikipedia as an example when it came to evaluating sources.

Because the things that we worry about with Wikipedia–accuracy, authenticity, authority, bias, audience and the like–are things that we should always worry at least a little bit about. Because Wikipedia is so problematic in these regards, and because these issues are so close to the surface, wouldn’t Wikipedia be an interesting tool to teach these issues?

I wasn’t the only one talking this way, and the ideas must have seemed compelling to a few of the faculty there, as at least two of the FYE classes this past academic year incorporated Wikipedia into their assignments.

I wasn’t really involved in the first class to try writing for Wikipedia, but the second class was Renaissance Culture. I have worked with the same two (wonderful) faculty members on this FYE ever since I started at CC, and I was excited to see how a Wikipedia assignment would pan out in that class.

Renaissance Culture

The students had two sets of four encyclopedia entries to write, chosen by the professors. They’d work in groups, first on one entry from the first set, then on an entry from the second set. Part of the assignment was to upload the finished encyclopedia articles to Wikipedia.

We did a session in one of the library computer labs where I introduced them to some of the concepts behind Wikipedia. I used a wiki, naturally enough, for the presentation.

I tried to start with some humor, specifically Stephen Colbert on “Wikiality”, the Onion, as well as some other background discussion on Wikipedia. The discussion revealed what students did and didn’t know about Wikipedia. While everyone seemed to get the idea that Wikipedia was written (potentially) by anybody with an Internet connection, some seemed surprised at the near total lack of “official” editorial control, marveling that edits became live as soon as they were saved. Remember: not every person under 20 years of age understands this stuff.

Then, to get them to understand how Wikipedia entries are laid out with the “history” and “discussion” tabs and the like, I gave them a very brief in-class activity of exploring Wikipedia by looking up a topic that they already knew something about and taking a look at the article and the supporting pages.

We also pulled out some more traditional printed encyclopedias and looked at how the treatment of Renaissance topics differed between, say, Britannica and the Grove Dictionary of Art. We talked a lot about encyclopedias as tertiary sources, and the so-called “neutral point of view” and how writing an encyclopedia article differed from the more thesis-driven papers they had been writing up to that point in the class.

After a little bit of playing around on a “sandbox” page on the class wiki and a brief discussion of wikipdeia syntax, we adjourned and the students worked on their entries in their separate groups over the next week or more.

Post-mortem

How did it go? To some extent, you can judge for yourself, as there are links to all the student-created articles on the home page of the wiki I created. It is interesting to see what articles have been edited a lot since they went up and which have languished.

I put a fair amount of emphasis on the Wikipedia culture, and writing for the audience of Wikipedia readers and writers. I also tried to hit on all the usual things we talk about when we talk about Wikipedia, like authority and accuracy. For their part, the professors put more emphasis on writing for encyclopedias in general.

I think that the faculty and students generally considered the assignment a success. I’m not sure if they will repeat the assignment or not. It was fairly time-consuming for all involved–there’s a lot of overhead in getting students feeling comfortable enough to post to the site. Also, the topics are a little problematic. The professors wanted the students to work on brand-new entries, so they had to come up with eight topics that were appropriate for the course, do-able in a short period of time, and that weren’t already in Wikipedia but were at least marginally appropriate for Wikipedia (you’ll notice that, as of this writing, some of the student-created articles have been suggested for combining with more general articles). Doing that year after year doesn’t sound appealing. (Of course, that’s not the only way to structure a Wikipedia assignment: there is a Wikipedia page on School and university projects using the site with guidelines, suggestions, and links to past projects.)

I hope that students came away with a more critical attitude toward Wikipedia–not critical as in “negative,” but critical as in greater understanding of how the sausage gets made. I hope that those lessons are generalizable to their reading and research on and off the web. At the very least, I hope that when they do use Wikipedia they’ll think back to this experience, and have a better understanding of the site and what uses it might and might not be appropriate for.