Understanding Wikis and Wikipedia

Demystifying Wikis and Wikipedia For Teaching

In this unit you will learn:

1. What a wiki is.
2. How to use a wiki.
3. The difference between a wiki and Wikipedia
4. How to find resources for using wikis in class.

Wikis

Wikis are an online software tool.  They allow collaborative writing and open up a world of possibility for team work in the classroom.  Before we get too technical, you should watch this wonderful video - Wikis in Plain English.

Wikipedia is just one use of a wiki.

Wikipedia is an application using a wiki software. It just happens to be the largest such application, but there are others. MCLA’s TechHelp is built on wiki software.

Educators tend to fall into two, very distinct camps when it comes to Wikipedia - there are those who reject it, and those who love it. Wikipedia is an open source online encyclopedia that anyone with access to the internet can edit.  Critics claim that the openness of Wikipedia is the problem— too many people can edit it and therefore it is not trustworthy.  However, research has shown that Wikipedia has about the same error rate as other major print encyclopedias, but the time to correct those errors is in seconds rather than years, precisely because Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, specifically people who are knowledgeable on the subject.

You can become a master Wikipedia reader by doing the same thing you ask your students to do, dig a bit deeper and pay attention to the details

1. I started with a simple search on John Adams. a quick scan of the page showed that it was well written and didn’t have what the Wikipedia community calls "vandalism". Vandalism would be someone editing the page to say that John Adams was their son, or that he liked to eat sushi in the bathtub. Things you know aren’t right. At the top of the page you should see four major tabs: article, discussion, edit this page and history. You are currently on the article tab, but you could easily edit the page by clicking on that tab. We’ll save edit for last. The article contains information that conforms to Wikipedia’s guidelines.

   

2. If you click on the discussion tab, a new page will appear which includes guidelines for discussing the article you are viewing, followed by a table of contents for the discussion topics. I like to show this page to my students because I think this is the page that really gets to the concept of how knowledge is generated and agreed up. Here you will find professional and armchair hobbyists engaged in debate.

   

3. The next tab that might interest you is the history tab.  This shows you who edited the page and what type of edits they made.  Wikipedia editors are very quick to pick up vandalism, and you might be interested to look through history files to see how much time escapes between someone vandalizng and someone correcting.  You can also revert back to saved, earlier versions or compare versions.  When using a wiki for teaching, this type of a page is incredibly valuable when it comes to editing and assessing individual contributions to group projects.  You will be able to identify which students did what porition of the work.

   

4. The final tab is the edit this page tab. This tab lets you go in and actually edit sections of text.  You’ll notice that within each section of the body, there is also an edit tab.  I find this more useful because it gets me straight to the text I want to update.  Once you update, please fill in the Edit Summary box, right above the save page box.  This lets other users know what kind of edits you’ve made.  Click Save Page and you are now part of the Wikipedia community!

   

Wikis in the classroom

There are many benefits to using wikis in a classroom. As a collaborative tool, wikis allow students to work on the same document without having to keep track of versions.  For group projects, the time stamp feature in a wiki can help a teacher identify each student’s contribution for grading.  One benefit that many teachers have found is that group writing tends to produce a higher quality of writing than individually written projects.

From For Teachers New to Wikis

How can teachers use wikis to facilitate teaching, writing development, and learning?

• Provide a space for free writing
• Debate course topics, including assigned readings
• Share resources such as annotated bibliographies, websites, effective writing samples, conferences, calls for manuscripts
• Maintain a journal of work performed on group projects
• Require students to collaborate on documents, such as an essay written by the entire class
• Discuss curricular and instructional innovations
• Inspire students to write a Wikibook
• Support service learning projects (i.e. use wikis to build a website about a challenge in their city)

What obstacles can teachers expect?

• Wikis conflict with traditional assumptions about authorship and intellectual property.
• Students are sometimes reluctant to contribute to wikis because they lack confidence in their writing, they worry about not receiving credit for contributions, or they do not like their ideas, words, contributions being revised or deleted without consent.
• Some teachers and students are uncomfortable about the advantages and disadvantages of public writing.
• Some technology averse students do not like having to learn how to use wikis and/or find even the relatively simple steps for editing or posting work daunting.
• Because Wikis are not presentation software, use of visuals and design options are limited.
• Although selecting "restore" to replace content that was inavertently deleted or intentionally hacked is easy, the editing process is nonetheless a hassle.