Students at Schreiner University enrolled in their Spring 2013 New Media Technology and Communication course to find that Professor Mary Grace Antony wanted them to expand Wikipedia articles. Antony found out about the Wikipedia Education Program through the National Communication Association Wikipedia Initiative.

“It seemed like the perfect fit for a course that examined technology and its impact on communication, while providing my students with a firsthand immersive experience with an online collaborative and research-oriented organization,” she says. Her colleagues have been enthusiastic about the project, and one reference librarian, Connor Baldwin, is now training as a Wikipedia Ambassador after supervising this assignment so he can best support others at Schreiner.

In the beginning of the semester, all students completed the training for students as an introduction to editing basics and norms, article selection, and referencing guidelines.

“Dan Simanek, our Campus Ambassador, provided an initial orientation, and even presented a Skype guest lecture where he reviewed the stub extension process and took questions from the class,” Mary Grace says. “User:Theopolisme, our Online Ambassador, provided invaluable feedback and real-time assistance whenever the students hit a roadbump. His patience was truly commendable.”

Students enjoyed the assignment, according to feedback they provided at the end of the term.

“I like how this project is virtually a group effort, and how others can jump in with their ideas,” said one of her students, User:Marshall90. “It challenged me to do something I would have never considered doing, yet it gave me the opportunity to share my work with others.”

The great thing about programs and projects like the Education Program is that new editors, who may not edit in the long-term, can still add great content and learn along the way. But it’s not just Wikipedia who benefits: students do, too.

“It is far more practical and immediately beneficial than a traditional class assignment,” Mary Grace says. “Developing a stub into a full-fledged article required focus, attention to detail, and good research and writing skills. The results were instantaneous and tangible, and this gave the students a more fulfilling and satisfying learning experience. Several of them appreciated writing for a global audience, rather than just the course professor.”

Even with all of these learning benefits, Antony’s favorite part of the assignment was her “students’ evolving and burgeoning pride in their work.”

“This has been one of my favorite assignments while at Schreiner,” said User:Saviands, one of her students. “I intend to keep up with the page and see what changes and edits are made.” Antony says she “can’t wait to do it again.”

Jami Mathewson, Wikipedia Education Program, United States and Canada

At Rice University, students pursuing a minor in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) must complete two core courses addressing poverty, justice, and human development. Since Spring 2010, Professor Diana Strassmann has given students in her courses the same final assignment: to create or expand Wikipedia articles about poverty and about the links between gender equality and economic development in various regions of the world. She has also trained the other professors who teach the minor’s core courses so that they can include the Wikipedia assignment.

Nadhika Ramachandran, a rising senior studying political science and international relations in addition to the PJHC minor, signed on for the first of the two core courses in Spring 2012 and learned that she would be editing Wikipedia. Nadhika was both excited and nervous.

“So many people turn to Wikipedia for information that you know your contribution can have a real impact in terms of how people view a certain subject,” she says. “Of course, that also made me a bit nervous because if I did not include certain information or an important viewpoint I would misinform people.”

For that term’s class, she significantly expanded the peacebuilding article, which introduced her to Wikipedia editing. Since Professor Strassmann has set this assignment up for both of the two core courses in the minor, Nadhika enrolled in the second class a year later. In that class, Nadhika created the Women in the Arab Spring article because she “felt it was an important issue that had no coverage” on English Wikipedia. The article explores women’s involvement in the political protests and demonstrations, including their role online.

“I love knowing that my work will educate people all over the world about an important but often-ignored topic,” Nadhika says. “The Arab world has a reputation of treating women as second-class citizens in areas like political participation, economic independence, personal freedoms, and general social status. When the Arab Spring first began, it seemed like a unique opportunity to boost the status of women in the Arab world. The protesters were pushing for democracy, increased political participation, respect for human rights, and better economic opportunities, all of which would improve the status of women. Additionally, women actually participated in the revolution as street protestors and in some countries, as leaders. However, as the new governments formed and Islamist parties won elections in most places people began to fear that they would actually curtail women’s rights. The impact of the Arab Spring remains to be seen.”

Nadhika’s class was supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors, who helped her and her classmates learn how to edit Wikipedia. The students received in-person support from university staff member Christine Cox as well as Virginia White and Joyce Chou, students who had taken the class in previous semesters. They could also seek assistance from long-time Wikipedia editors Mike Christie, Justin Knapp, and Pat Earley.

“The dedication of the other editors in the community reinforced the impact of our work and their support made me feel more comfortable when editing,” Nadhika said. After spending a few days responding to those editors’ constructive feedback, she submitted the new article to appear on the main page of Wikipedia as a Did You Know, and it appeared on March 25, with more than 1,500 views. Soon after creating the article, she was already able to achieve her goal of sharing the fruits of her academic studies with more people.

Thanks to Professor Strassmann’s advocacy for Wikipedia assignments, many students at Rice are editing Wikipedia during multiple terms. The students don’t necessarily edit in between assignments, but they’re returning to Wikipedia with a stronger editing background and familiarity with norms, so they have more time and energy to create even better content. Even though Nadhika has completed her class assignment, she plans to expand the section about the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests once her schedule clears at the end of the term.

Jami Mathewson
Wikipedia Education Program United States and Canada Associate

Getting newcomers started effectively on Wikipedia is one of Wikimedia Foundation’s biggest challenges, and has been — in one way or another — the central focus of the Wikipedia Education Program. When we launched the Wikipedia Ambassador Program in 2010, it was all about in-person training: bringing together experienced Wikipedians and newcomers, and teaching the newcomers enough to find their own way on Wikipedia — and even teach others. To make the program scale, though, we knew we’d need more self-service training, something a professor or would-be Wikipedia Ambassador could do on their own time and at their own pace.

For English Wikipedia, we put together the first versions of the online trainings for professors and Wikipedia Ambassadors in mid-2012. Soon, we realized that a lot of what we’d developed for professors and Campus Ambassadors could also work well for students. So we took out the assignment design module, tweaked a little of the language, and voilà, the training for students was born!

A formal orientation program for students would be new territory, so we were anxious to see if students would find it useful — or have the patience for an hour-long training course. The training works well as a first assignment for a class in the Education Program, so we created a form at the end for students to show they completed it. The form also asks for feedback: what they liked and didn’t like, what was missing, and what was unnecessary.

Based on this early feedback along with a few live user tests, we could see that it might be usable, but there was plenty of room for improvment. So we iterated quickly to make the training more streamlined and to fix specific pain points as quickly as feedback came in. By the end of the year, we had fixed most of the simple issues, and most of the new feedback was positive.

2013 marked the first systematic use of our new structured course pages on English Wikipedia, and we built prominent links to the training into the couse pages students interact on, the reference materials we send to professors, and the information we provide to Wikipedia Ambassadors. One challenge with materials developed for the Education Program is that we essentially have two shots per year at making changes: immediately prior to the spring term and immediately prior to the fall term. And it looks like the changes we made at the end of 2012 to publicize the trainings more have really helped!

So far this term, we’ve had more than 375 users complete the training—compared to 42 last term. This level of feedback has given us the chance to focus on the little things that affect students’ overall experiences. For example, one recurring theme in the feedback has been the videos: students either really like them, or really don’t. The ones who don’t like watching videos, preferring to read through text at their own pace, didn’t like it when the videos went into more detail than the text. So we made the text parallel the videos more closely. Now users can choose whether to watch the videos, read the text, or both, and they get similar information either way.

These changes cycle back into the other trainings too, including both the educators and ambassadors training, and the short newcomers training that was spun off for a quick general intro for users who can’t be expected to do an hour-long training before they begin. Just since January, the training for students landing page has had more than 4,000 page views.

Next up: spreading it beyond English Wikipedia! Porting the training to Portuguese Wikipedia is already underway, with more languages to come.

Want to try the training yourself? The newcomers version takes about 20 minutes.

Sage Ross, Wikipedia Education Program Online Communications

Every graduate student gets assigned a lot of reading, but not every graduate student gets assigned to read something they’ve written. That happened to Jacqueline McCrory in fall 2012, thanks to the Wikipedia Education Program.

As a master’s student in Environmental Management at the University of San Francisco and an employee at environmental consulting firm Analytical Environmental Services (AES), Jacqueline knew a lot about habitat conservation plans (HCPs) — but there wasn’t anything on the topic on Wikipedia. So when she enrolled in Professor Aaron Frank’s Environmental Law class in spring 2012 and discovered that Professor Frank assigned writing a Wikipedia article on a course-related topic, Jacqueline gravitated toward creating one.

“I chose this topic because the existing article had very limited information and the concept is important for conservationists as well as environmental planners,” she explains. “The legal documents pertaining to HCPs can be extensive and somewhat convoluted to read through, so I wanted to create a source that would clearly provide the need-to-know information to interested readers.”

Jacqueline was excited by the prospect of writing something that would have a global audience, and further her study of the conservation of special status species. She had support from two veterans of Wikipedia assignments: Professor Frank has participated in the Wikipedia Education Program since its pilot in spring 2011, as has Campus Ambassador Derrick Coetzee. With their assistance, Jacqueline and a fellow classmate created the article on Habitat Conservation Plans.

Other professors at the University of San Francisco noticed that the article on such an important topic to their field of study had been created, although they didn’t realize it had been written by a student in their program. One such professor assigned the article as required reading for students in his fall 2012 Natural Resources Management course. Little did he know, the author of the article was taking his class that term.

“When I informed the instructor that I had actually written the article, he acknowledged the depth and quality of the article and invited me to prepare a guest lecture on the subject material for my own class,” she says.

Jacqueline didn’t just receive kudos for her Wikipedia article at her university: her supervisors at AES recognized her expertise in the subject, and gave her related assignments. She’s grateful for the opportunity that Professor Frank’s class gave her, as she says she would never have edited Wikipedia without that nudge. And she recognizes how beneficial Wikipedia assignments are to students.

“Most papers that we write for undergraduate and graduate level courses end up being read by the professor grading the assignment and remain in electronic folders to be deleted as trash at some point in the future; however, when published as Wikipedia articles, these academic papers can be viewed and used as resources and references for countless other people and may continue to serve a purpose,” Jacqueline says.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Anne Nelson’s class at Columbia University

In the summer of 2011, I got an invitation to attend the Wikimedia Foundation’s education summit in Boston. The summit opened my eyes to the ways other professors were using Wikipedia in the classroom, and to the additional potential suggested by the Wikipedia community.

I came back to New York energized and determined to work a Wikipedia component into my syllabus. My classrooms are unusual in several respects. First, we study the workings of digital media projects with an emphasis on evaluation, content which doesn’t easily lend itself to writing traditional Wikipedia articles. Second, my students tend to be about half international students. Third, it’s hard for me to devote more than a single class to a given tool or platform. Students have been publishing class wikis on the Columbia platform from the course’s inception, but this material is not directly transferrable to Wikipedia content. (See http://newmediadev2011.wikischolars.columbia.edu/) Finally, I was limited by the lack of a Wikipedia Ambassador. Whatever I tried had to rely on my own stretched resources, plus the students from the class.

All of my 25 students used Wikipedia, but only one or two had ever edited. But one of them, Michelle Chahine, volunteered to spent time with Wikipedia’s instructional tools and boil down a simplified version for class use. I then asked students to write, edit, or correct a Wikipedia article in English about an area of special knowledge and expertise, and record the process.

Then they performed the same exercise on a Wikipedia article in an additional language. This was where things got really interesting. First, my students had assumed that Wikipedia content on the same subject would be similar in different languages. This was often not the case. One student from Eastern Europe had extensive experience in minority rights. She looked at the Wikipedia article on Roma (or gypsies) in English, and added a minor edit. But the entry in her native language disturbed her with its negative language. She performed an edit with full citation, but it was immediately taken down by the lead editor of the page, who had written the problematic content. This showed us how powerful the correction process could be in a large language group, but also signaled problems in in small language groups (in this case, about 10 million people) or countries with less experience in creating content.

This year, the most interesting result came from an Asian student who had grown up in a rural area, and strongly believes in the mission of Wikipedia to bring information to areas that lack printed resources. This student reviewed the entry about women who had been captured by the Japanese army during World War II and forced to sexually service the troops. My student found that the English page used accurate language to describe their plight, but the entry in his native language used a term closer to “prostitute.” He performed an edit, and at least initially, it held. But the class was struck by the importance of the terminology, given the likelihood that the victims’ grandchildren would read this version of their families’ wartime experience.

I shared student papers on these topics with the Wikimedia Foundation (with the students’ permission), and I’m eager to see where these assignments will go in the future. I can already see one major advantage: there is an absolute difference between being a passive Wikipedia reader, and performing even a single minor edit. Once a student (or a professor) gets his “feet wet” with an edit, he crosses the boundary into being a contributor, and takes the capability along wherever he goes.

Anne Nelson is a specialist on international media and an award-winning author and playwright. She teaches at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“Editing Wikipedia is an enormous responsibility — one that I welcome,” says Ingrid Haugen.

Word had made its way to Ingrid in 2011 about the Association for Psychological Sciences Wikipedia Initiative — a project calling upon APS members to improve the information available on Wikipedia about pyschology-related topics, either by editing themselves or by asking their students to edit. Ingrid had been hoping that one of her classes at Roosevelt University in Chicago would participate in the APS initiative, so that she could learn how to edit Wikipedia. She got her wish in her final term before she graduated, when she took Lisa Lu’s course Brain and Behavior, which was participating in the APS initiative and the Wikipedia Education Program.

Professor Lu identified several articles about psychology related to brain and behavior on the English Wikipedia that needed improvement, and asked students to pick ones they were interested in working on, then assigned small groups to articles based on their selections. Ingrid was particularly interested in learning more about electroencephalography techniques, so she was glad to be assigned to the article Mu wave.

Ingrid Haugen

“I really enjoyed using code to add references, wikilinks, images, and so on,” Ingrid says. “I realize that most of my classmates found the code to be sufficiently opaque so that they had trouble using it effectively, but I found it engaging.”

Because she became so hooked on Wikipedia editing, Ingrid took the lead with her group — adding most of the content to Wikipedia, rewriting sections to achieve similar style and tone throughout the article, and interacting with editors, which she had been nervous about.

“After learning about edit wars and so on, I was unsure of how our edits would be received,” she explains. “I was relieved to find that the editors who had been following our article were interested in seeing us succeed more than anything else. One editor in particular, Tryptofish, was very active and helpful. This editor actually performed an article merge for us; the merge had been discussed on Mu wave’s talk page but I was nervous about executing it myself. This same editor gave me an editor’s barnstar when our project was completed. Receiving the barnstar actually inspired me to submit the article for the Good Article review process. I have found the community of editors to be intelligent, dedicated, and helpful.”

With input from classmates, Online Ambassador Smallman12q, and other editors, Ingrid set out making the article better throughout the duration of her course. In mid-December, Mu wave passed the Good Article review process.

“Almost every aspect of the project involved new skills, from finding secondary sources to dealing with computing code,” Ingrid says. “That made it challenging, and I enjoy challenges because they mean that I am learning a great deal by meeting them. It was exciting, if a bit intimidating, to make our writing immediately available to anybody with an internet connection. Unlike a traditional project that might never be read again after it is graded, the fruits of this assignment have the potential to live on and make a real contribution to the popular conception of the area each group addressed.”

And, she says, “it is deeply satisfying to see my work come up in a Google search, something that would never happen as the result of a term paper. To know that anybody who is curious enough about mu waves to conduct an internet search will be able to click on my article if they so choose is very exciting.”

Since completing her coursework and graduating, Ingrid has continued to make minor edits to articles, something she intends to keep doing. She says the Wikipedia assignment enabled her to feel capable of contributing something valuable to Wikipedia, and she will continue looking for opportunities to do so. She even holds out hope to have another Wikipedia assignment in a future course; she intends to keep pursuing her studies in social neuroscience at the Ph.D. level.

“I think that Wikipedia assignments are a fantastic way for students to become accustomed to thinking of themselves in a worldly, professional context rather than as on an island of very local influence,” she says.

For other examples of good work from editors in the Wikipedia Education Program, please see the trophy case.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

In 2005, a high school freshman from Clarksville, Maryland, named Kevin Li discovered Wikipedia. Kevin was amazed that anyone would spend the time to write detailed articles on such a wide range of topics. Today, Kevin is a college senior at Washington University in St. Louis, and he has joined the ranks of those who contribute to Wikipedia.

Kevin got his start with Wikipedia editing through a class project on chronobiology where he worked in a group to improve the article on scientist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. They brought the article all the way to Good Article status, so Kevin was excited to enroll in another class, Professor Joan Strassmann’s Behavioral Ecology course, where he would be solely responsible for an article.

“I was surprised that some of the animals and behaviors we learned about weren’t on Wikipedia,” Kevin says. “The article that I am working on, worker policing, has been in the scientific literature for more than two decades and hadn’t been discussed. It’s fun to bring some of these concepts into the wiki community, since I feel that being a contributor is equally as important as being a consumer of information.”

Worker policing — the subject of Kevin’s article — is common in honey bees.

Since the topic was not yet covered on Wikipedia, Kevin created a page that contained just the title of the article. Volunteer Heather Walls tagged the article for deletion since it had no content. Kevin came by two hours later and was surprised to discover that his page had been deleted by an editor named WilyD.

“I was contacted by the editor who had marked the page and I responded to her comments,” Kevin explains. “The misunderstanding was resolved and she was even nice enough to add a picture on the article.”

WilyD came back once Kevin had expanded it, and was impressed enough by Kevin’s work to nominate the article to appear on Wikipedia’s main page in the Did You Know section. Kevin’s article appeared on the main page on October 17 and received more than 1,500 views.

“The DYK reviewer asked me to work on the leads and to clarify some of the body paragraphs, which I happily did. Afterward, we were good to go!” Kevin says. “Many of the editors have been helpful with constructive criticism. It was really exciting to see the interest that people had for the article when it went up. I’m still working on making the article better. After some more edits, I hope to get it to Good Article status.”

Kevin is glad to see something he is interested in have more coverage on Wikipedia. That’s one of the reasons he prefers Wikipedia assignments to traditional term papers. He says while the research process is similar, he prefers Wikipedia assignments because of the large audience for his work and the collaboration that comes from work with classmates and other editors on Wikipedia articles.

“Working on wiki is like constructing a miniature classroom for yourself, where you can become an expert given the proper effort. It’s also a work station where I can collect my thoughts and organize them into a product that everyone can see,” he says. “Wikipedia is really one of those sites that I still love going to and exploring what’s out there. It feels nice to be a contributor.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Students in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada improved article quality on the English Wikipedia by an average of 88 percent during Spring 2012, according to new research conducted by Luis Campos, an external data analyst. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to improve course-related articles, with support from Wikipedia Ambassadors who help students learn the basics of Wikipedia editing.

Experienced Wikipedia editors evaluated a random sample of articles students worked on as part of the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada in Spring 2012. The metric evaluators used, with assessment areas for comprehensiveness, sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting, and illustrations, on a 26-point scale, is based on the Wikipedia 1.0 metric used across English Wikipedia. Evaluators provided two ratings, one for the article quality immediately prior to the first edit the student made, and one after the class had wrapped up their work; reviewers also used the same metric to evaluate articles that students created from scratch. A total of 124 articles formed the sample. Altogether (counting both new and pre-existing articles), articles improved on average 6.5 points, from 7.4 to 13.98 points on the 26-point scale. The graph below shows the quality distribution of articles before students worked on them (in blue), and the quality distributions of articles after students worked on them (in red).

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows overall improvement (both existing and new articles).

The 124-article sample included 82 existing articles and 42 new articles created by students. Existing articles improved 2.94 points on average, from 11.26 to 14.2, with the most improved article improving by 10.25 points. An example of such an article that a student improved is the article on vocabulary development. You can see the versions prior to students’ first edits and the status it was after the class finished. The graph below shows the distribution of pre-existing articles before (blue) and after (red) student work.

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows improvement of existing articles only.

New articles had an average score of 13.55. You can see a sample of what a student contributed to a new article by reading Temptation, a Václav Havel play. The graph below shows the distribution of quality of new articles students created through the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Spring 2012 numbers show improvement over the 2010–11 quality of students contributions from the Public Policy Initiative pilot of the U.S. program, where articles improved an average of 5.8 points. We’re encouraged to see improvement in Wikipedia’s article quality through the Wikipedia Education Program.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Dana Westerkam was entering her final year at Davidson College in Fall 2011, and like many college students, she’d had the notion that Wikipedia was a disreputable source. But, the South Carolina native says, she always felt like Wikipedia had the potential to be great, especially in the area of psychology, her field of study. So she was excited to learn that her Cognitive Psychology class, taught by Dr. Greta Munger, was participating in the Wikipedia Education Program, and that she’d be writing a Wikipedia article for class.

Dana Westerkam

With classmate Emily Matiak, Dana chose to work on the article on confabulation, a cognitive psychology article that was missing some key elements. Dana really enjoyed the work.

“It had a lot of the same feel as a traditional assignment. For example, both require the same process of acquiring research. However, the actual writing in the Wikipedia assignment allowed for much more creativity and flexibility. Students can add neat pictures that aid in their explanations and decide the layout of the page,” Dana says. “Especially as a senior in college, it was refreshing to do something different that allowed me to get creative.”

She enjoyed the assignment so much that she was excited to take a senior capstone class with Dr. Munger in Spring 2012, the History and Systems in Psychology. Dana worked alone to improve the article on insight, which she had noticed was lacking in references.

Dana’s Online Ambassador, Smallman12q, provided excellent feedback and guidance as she improved the insight article.

“I would post on his talk page, and he was extremely prompt and helpful in his responses. It helped a lot,” Dana says. “I have been extremely encouraged by the community of editors. Everyone seems ready to help each other and contribute to this Wikipedia overhaul together. Several editors have even provided me with helpful feedback for improvements, as well as guidance on how to do certain formatting issues.”

Learning wiki markup was the hardest part of the assignment for Dana, but she says she figured it out, and is confident others can, too. The downsides of learning the technology were far outweighed by having her college work published on Wikipedia.

“My favorite part was being able to show my parents what I was working on in school. Parents frequently call with the question, ‘You learning anything in school? What have you been working on?’” Dana says. “It is so boring to email them a 12-page research paper. I loved being able to say, ‘Mom and Dad, Google “confabulation” or “insight”. See that Wikipedia page that pops up… I wrote that!’”

Dana graduated from Davidson this spring and is applying to medical school. She hopes to have more opportunities to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in the future.

“I would love to encourage other schools and professors to get involved with the project,” she says. “As a student, it is so cool to see your work published online and to know that your information will be read by many, not just yourself and your professor. It makes you feel like your work has more of a purpose than just for a grade.”

— LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the fall 2011 term. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign students to contribute to Wikipedia, usually in the form of expanding a stub article, in place of a traditional research paper grade. At the end of the fall 2011 term, we asked students who participated in the U.S. and Canada program to fill out a survey on their experiences. A total of 132 students took the survey, with a little over three-quarters of the respondents from the United States. About 61 percent of the respondents were enrolled in undergraduate courses, while the remainder were enrolled in graduate courses.

Learning outcomes

A series of questions were designed around assessing student learning outcomes. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. Students from the United States and graduate students all reported higher beliefs in the benefits of a Wikipedia assignment. More than half of the respondents felt that doing a Wikipedia assignment improved (1) their ability to identify poor quality Wikipedia articles and (2) their ability to identify bias in documents. In addition, more than half the respondents felt their ability to write a neutral (i.e., balanced point-­of-­view) document improved through a Wikipedia assignment more than through a standard term paper.

These findings indicate that students recognize the media literacy benefits in doing a Wikipedia assignment. As professors have noted, when Wikipedia is not the destination of the student’s research on a topic, but is instead the road, students are forced out of their research comfort zone. Students are required to evaluate the reliability of sources, find journal articles, and write from a neutral point of view to meet Wikipedia’s policy requirements.

Support resources

Student participants use a set of resources when they have questions about editing Wikipedia — online text, Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and professors to name a few. Online text is the most commonly used resource, followed by printed materials. Nearly 93 percent of students who consulted their Campus Ambassador found him or her to be helpful, and 74 percent of students who consulted an Online Ambassador said he or she was helpful.

We’ve found that having that support makes a big difference to students. Students can chat with their Campus Ambassadors in person on campus or on wiki, and they can interact with Online Ambassadors on-wiki and through an IRC chatroom where they can get immediate help for quick questions.

Students had a positive interaction with the Wikipedia community of editors when they interacted with them. Students were asked to pick two adjectives to describe their views of the Wikipedia editing community; top responses included “helpful” (72 percent), “collaborative” (39 percent), and “intelligent” (27 percent).

Motivations

We asked students to identify the key motivations for their contributions to Wikipedia. Important factors students reported were getting a grade, interest in their Wikipedia article topic, and the usefulness of their work (i.e., it wasn’t another throwaway assignment). Graduate students reported a broader variety of motivations, when compared to undergraduates. In particular, more than 60 percent of the graduate students gave a high ranking to the fact that their work contributes to a freely accessible knowledge base.

Final comments and looking ahead

Although converting students into longterm editors is not an explicit goal of the Wikipedia Education Program, as many as 46 percent of our respondents expressed interest in continuing to edit Wikipedia.

When students were asked to share the hardest thing about their Wikipedia editing experience, some common themes emerged. Many students mentioned the challenges of learning how Wikipedia works, and how editing an article was a lot more work than they imagined. Almost universally, they talked about how hard it was to learn wiki syntax. The Visual Editor will help alleviate many of these concerns.

To sum up, here’s what one student had to say when asked about any memorable experiences:

“Overall, a great learning experience. Having to really validate anything you say by backing it with a reputable source is incredibly beneficial and students should be exposed to this, especially if they have not had a research methods course in their undergraduate career.”

Ayush Khanna
Data Analyst, Global Development