Background
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia) is to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” In this assignment, we are going to contribute to this effort.
We have, over the course of this semester, learned a little about how Wikipedia works through trainings on our Wikipedia course dashboard. As we have discussed, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias do not present original research. Instead, encyclopedias summarize existing research. This is why they are sometimes called tertiary sources (as opposed to primary or secondary sources).
We have also already seen that Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. This can make the articles on Wikipedia better, but it can also make the articles worse than more traditionally published encyclopedias. As we’ve discussed, a person looking for reliable information on a subject should read the sources cited in a Wikipedia article and decide if those sources are reliable.
Though a Wikipedia article is meant to provide an objective summary of existing research, there are many arguments/claims that are involved in creating an article. A review of talk pages on articles about controversial topics will reveal that editors often make arguments to support a decision to organize an article in a particular way or include certain information. This is perhaps best illustrated through the talk page for the article describing the events of January 6, 2021.
The Assignment
Your goal with this final assignment is to improve the quality of openly licensed resources about a topic that you have researched thoroughly (either this semester or in another context). The simplest way to do this is to use Wikipedia’s article finder tool to find an article related to your research project. Because you have already found and read reliable sources while working on this project, you have knowledge that you can use to improve an article.
I hope you all will choose to engage with the Wikipedia platform and improve an article there, but this is not the only way to meet the goals of this assignment. Though Wikipedia is probably the most visible source of openly licensed educational resources in the world, it is not the only platform people use to publish openly licensed resources. At the end of the semester, I will make our course website, which is built with WordPress on the OpenLab platform, public. Right now, our site is private, but when I make it public all of my work on the site (the syllabus, assignment prompts, and example posts) will have a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Anyone who finds the site will be welcome to reproduce any of the content as long as they communicate where they got it in an attribution statement. In other words, our course website will eventually contain freely licensed educational content (it might also contain your work, which you can license–or not–as you wish!). Text published on Wikipedia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-BY-SA). This means that anyone in the world can take the content of the Wikipedia article and republish it somewhere else as long as they communicate that the information is from Wikipedia and license their work in the same way. We will discuss some of the reasons someone might choose to strengthen the world’s understanding of a topic by adapting content from Wikipedia for another platform.
As stated above, your goal with this final assignment is to improve the quality of openly licensed resources about a topic that you have researched thoroughly (either this semester or in another context). You have two options for accomplishing this task. You can improve one or more articles on Wikipedia or you can adapt content from one or more articles to build a new resource (as a post on our course website). Edits to Wikipedia must be made public on the site, but content published on our course website can be kept private and you can decide on the license you want to put on your work.
The amount of work you put into this assignment will differ depending on the topic you select. It may be that you focus your energy on improving one thing (like citations) in an entire article, or it might be that you focus on making one section as strong as possible. Based on what you set out to accomplish, I will offer feedback on that piece of the article according to the standards laid out in Wikipedia trainings (the “evaluating articles and sources” training). If you decide to adapt Wikipedia content for a post on our course website, I will offer feedback on the entirety of your post.
After you have finished work on your project, you will write a 500-word reflection considering your experiences with this assignment in relation to your experience developing an argument-based project this semester.
You will have many opportunities to get my feedback as you work on this project–please take advantage of this. Ask questions in class and make an appointment with me if you’d like. You can also write me an email to ask me to review what you have in your sandbox before you make changes to an actual Wikipedia article (I can make a feedback video).
Template for Final Project Description and Reflection
Please create a Word document with the following and upload to Canvas:
- (If you edit on Wikipedia) My Wikipedia username is: ___________________
- Summary of Work Done (quickly describe what your goals were and how you revised what was already on Wikipedia)
- Reflection (Approximately 500 words; complete this one week AFTER you’ve made your edits public on Wikipedia or completed your post)
Example Projects
A summary of student edits during Spring 2023
An example project on OpenLab: “The Legacy of Barbra Walters”
