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.
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. If you don’t want to make public edits to Wikipedia, you can revise a section of a Wikipedia article as a private post on our course website.
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 revise Wikipedia content for a private post on our course website, we will discuss your goals and whether I should evaluate according to Wikipedia’s policies or something else.
After you have finished work on your project (at least one week after you’ve made your edits public on Wikipedia if you choose to do this), you will write a reflection (approximately 500 words) considering your experiences with this assignment in relation to your experience developing your research project all semester.
You will have many opportunities to get my feedback in class as you work on this project–please take advantage of this and share your experiences with the class (even, or especially, stories about an edit being reverted!). Class discussion about individual student experiences editing Wikipedia will help us all get a more nuanced understanding of the Wikipedia community.
Project Reflection
As you prepare your reflections on the Wikipedia project, here are some questions to consider:
- What was your impression of Wikipedia before this class started? How often did you use it and how did you think about its reliability? Has any of that changed because of things you learned or experienced during the semester?
- What specific experiences with Wikipedia (either reading it, citing it, or making changes to it) have impacted your thinking?
- Was there anything a classmate described that impacted your thinking?
- Was there anything from a training that impacted your thinking?
- What would you tell someone who didn’t take this course about Wikipedia?
Please compose your reflection as a post (not a discussion reflection!) on OpenLab and share the following details in a text entry in Canvas.
- (If you edit on Wikipedia) My Wikipedia username is: ___________________
Example Projects
A summary of student edits during Spring 2023
