On July 13, 2012, I had the pleasure to present, “Translation and Transnational Scholarship” at Wikimania 2012 at  The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the presentation I spoke about my role as a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador in two of Professor Adel Iskandar’s graduate courses: New Media, Innovation, Community, & Dissidence (Fall 2011) and  Media and Communications in the Arab World (Spring 2012) at Georgetown University through the U.S. Education Program (WP:USEP). Each course had two Wikipedia components: article creation and in-class group edits. I became involved with the USEP  because I was eager to help students visualize news and history that had not been yet been represented as a part popular knowledge.

United States Education Program logo

The U.S. Education Program came to Georgetown in the Fall 2010 term and has since been incorporated into 14 courses university wide.  The program provides assistance to professors who want to integrate Wikipedia article creation and editing as part of a course. The support materials include not only wiki markup handouts and brochures, but also both online and offline points of contact. In the classroom, a Campus Ambassador (me, in this case) gives two tutorials, one that focuses on introducing the students to the culture of Wikipedia and one that focuses more on the technical aspects, such as how to contribute a photo and how to edit existing Wikipedia articles. In addition, the program includes the support of an Online Ambassador, who assists the students with more technical questions.

It was extremely enriching to watch the students become explorers during the course. They had to find and discover legitimate sources to not only support emerging social movements, but technologies as well. Students thus found creative ways of writing about technological phenomena as they unfolded in the Arab world, such as finding Arabic citations about the Rassd News Network (RNN), an Arabic Facebook feed, translating them, and making the topic notable for the Wikipedia community and public at large.

I would argue that the more interesting side of Wikipedia editing occurs on the article talk pages, where knowledge production takes place.  It helps students think critically about who decides what is notable or worth adding to the article’s content. It is not one person producing content, but multiple people collaborating together to decide what and how it should be said (and cited!). It is this collaborative aspect of Wikipedia editing that indirectly creates an incentive for academic research offline: What was the process of creating a Wikipedia article? Why was one source rejected and one not?  These questions help augment the following high impact learning outcomes: media and information literacy, critical thinking and research skills, and writing skills development. These outcomes help deepen student learning and engagement, both in and out of the classroom.

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Not only had Karl Wahlen never edited Wikipedia prior to September 2011, he didn’t even know he could. That all changed when Karl enrolled in a University of Pittsburgh class called Sociology of Marriage, taught by Wikipedian Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student and a Teaching Fellow from Department of Sociology, and the Pittsburgh native found himself having to write a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework.

“When I learned on the first day that that I was going to be doing a Wikipedia project, I was rather confused,” Karl admits. “Honestly, when I first thought about it, I wondered how you worked on it, as I did not know at that point that you could even have an account on wikipedia, much less how it worked or how you used it.”

Karl Wahlen is an avid dog lover along with being an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh (pictured with his dog JJ).

Karl’s a busy student. He’s majoring in psychology, sociology, BPhil (BPhil is an honors degree where he does the equivalent of a master’s thesis in his undergraduate years), and biology, while also getting a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine, and a minor in economics and chemistry. His multidisciplinary interests led Karl to want to work on the article on Joint custody in the United States, which had elements of psychology and sociology. The article had languished for years without many sources or without being particularly well-written (you can see the version before Karl and his classmates started working on it here. Karl’s input helped bring the article up to meet the Did you know requirements, which landed the article on Wikipedia’s main page in late November. By early December, the article had passed the Good Article review process as well.

Karl credits help from his professor, Piotr Konieczny, for forcing students to write Wikipedia articles for class. A longtime supporter of the Schools and universities projects on Wikipedia, Piotr is also an Online Ambassador and instructor in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States. Piotr’s course was the first to participate in the American Sociology Association’s new Wikipedia Initiative.

“Our instructor really helped on every step of the way, especially when showing us how to interact with the community,” Karl says. “You occasionally get people who are not the nicest when they disagree with you, but in general individuals tend to remain respectful with each other, and for the most part all criticism ends up leading to a higher quality article in the end, which is a good thing.”

In fact, the research skills he gained through doing the Wikipedia assignment actually helped him tremendously in another class he’s taking this term on research methods. Learning to cite every sentence and making sure that every claim he made could be backed up to a reliable source for Wikipedia taught him valuable research and writing skills.

“I still maintain that this Wikipedia project made a world of difference in being able to write well,” Karl says. “And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that the joint custody (United States) article is being read by 80+ people a day.”

Karl’s research for the Wikipedia assignment led him to want to add more to Wikipedia. He’s already created stub articles on Split custody and Sole custody, which he intends to expand in the near future.

“I will absolutely continue to edit after the class is over,” Karl says. “My instructor was outstanding and it will be a nice way to keep in touch with him. And not only can I do this to keep providing new information to others, but it also looks pretty darned good on a resume to say you spend your free time working on making articles to help people than sitting around watching TV. Thankfully, I enjoy doing this, so it is not like a chore to do.”