Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: Wikipedia Works to Improve Its Academic Image

Is Wikipedia a credible academic source? The Wikipedia Education Program aims to improve the tool’s reputation among professors and students. But some educators don’t need any convincing.

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Filed by Kelsey H.

Within the classroom, Wikipedia has long been synonymous with words like “untrustworthy,” “fallacious,” and “non-academic.” However, recently I noticed many of my own university professors opening up to the idea of using the resource to double-check facts, and I began seeing it cited more frequently in academic papers, which made me wonder – is Wikipedia improving its image in academia?

Although the answer to this question may be determined by the teacher, Wikipedia is working from the inside to become a more credible academic source. The Wikipedia Education Program, a new initiative, aims to make Wikipedia a “worldwide teaching tool.” The program is based on data gained from a pilot program, the Public Policy Initiative, launched to integrate the online encyclopedia into university classrooms during the 2010-2011 academic year.

LiAnna Davis, the Wikipedia Education Program communications manager, told Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider that this initiative is “one of a number of projects to increase the quality of content” on the site, and both in-person and online “ambassadors” are being recruited to serve as Wikipedia advocates inside university doors. Ambassadors are experienced Wikipedia editors sent to train professors and other school officials on Wikipedia article construction, format, tagging, and community etiquette.

Wikipedia ambassadors are not only there to help professors learn how to construct articles, but also to help them develop lesson plans and syllabi that incorporate the consistent use of Wikipedia. Professors who participate in the program receive mock-ups from the Wikimedia Foundation to get them started. One example syllabus outlined a 12-week college course around Wikipedia, complete with handouts on basic Wikicode and lessons covering everything from citing sources to avoiding plagiarism.

The foundation also aims to encourage students to become editors and help create content, as well. “A major part of the Wikipedia Education Program consists of having students edit Wikipedia pages related to their field of study,” reported Fast Company. According to Davis, professors have found that students are motivated to contribute to a website that they use regularly.

As Ungerleider noted, the increasing ubiquity of Wikipedia has played an important role in its process of legitimization – and its popularity has not decreased, despite claims of errors or biases.

“It is rare to find an academic who is not at least an occasionally Wikipedia user,” Ungerleider wrote. “More common are the cases of academics such as University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Edward Erikson, who said that, ‘Wikipedia is always present in the classroom—whether it’s invited to attend or not.’”

As a longtime student, all of this gave me pause. For me, Wikipedia has always had its place in the grand spectrum of digital information as a platform of un-vetted, user-written, and community-controlled content. It’s great for looking up a character in that movie you saw three years ago but forgot the name of, and the second-to-last song on that album you loved when you were a teenager – but I had been hesitant to rely on it for much more than that. However, today’s Wikipedia is not exactly the same tool I grew up with – and was told to avoid – in the classroom; rather, it is much more dynamic and has several layers that can be quite useful to high school and higher education students and teachers.

In fact, many educators consider Wikipedia to be an essential part of their curriculum. Lessons that incorporate editing subject pages teach key digital literacy skills, including collaboration, writing for a public audience, and learning how to research and identify accurate information online.

Vicki Davis, a full-time teacher, education blogger, and advocate for using new technologies in the classroom, recently posted “Wiki Wiki Teaching: The Art of Using Wiki Pages to Teach,” a step-by-step breakdown of how she uses Wikipedia in the classroom. The post is the introduction to a four-part series on the educational use of Wikis. Part one teaches students about tagging and is currently available on her blog.

And in a recent interview, John Seeley Brown told Spotlight Wikipedia is valuable as a source for learning about scholarship and the debate of ideas within a scholarly community. “If you go to Wikipedia and just take the front page as an authoritative source, you’re apt to be screwed,” he said. “But if you open up the history, it’s like peering into the backroom of the Britannica. You begin to see the debates, what knowledge is still being contested, what knowledge is stabilized. It’s a great source for learning and witnessing competitive argumentation (a limited form of scholarship) in practice.”

For additional resources, Edudemic recently published a list of nine tools for using Wikipedia in the classroom, and the Wikimedia Foundation provides a similar list of 10 steps for using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education.

What do you think about Wikipedia’s role in the classroom? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.