Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard

Course details

In this step, the instructor will input standard information about their course.

Assignment types

In this step, the instructor will learn about the recommended types of Wikipedia assignments supported by the wizard, and the relevant learning goals for them.

Wikipedia Assignments and learning goals

Depending on the learning goals you have for your course and how much time you want to devote to your Wikipedia project, there are many effective ways to use Wikipedia in your course. The classic Wikipedia writing assignment involves students learning the basics of Wikipedia, then planning, researching, writing, and revising a previously missing or poor quality Wikipedia article, with milestones spread over the whole term. This often takes the place of a traditional term paper or research project. There are also many smaller assignments you can use to help students engage with and think critically about Wikipedia.

Experienced instructors say it is crucial for students who are going to be editing Wikipedia to become comfortable not only with the markup, but also the community. Introducing the Wikipedia project early in the term and requiring milestones throughout the term will acclimate students to the site and head off procrastination.

To make the the most of your Wikipedia project, try to integrate your Wikipedia assignment with the course themes. Engage your students with questions of media literacy and knowledge construction throughout your course.

Assignment type: Research and write a Wikipedia

Description

Working individually or in small teams with your guidance, students choose course-related topics that are not covered well on Wikipedia. After assessing Wikipedia's current coverage, the students research their topics to find high-quality secondary sources, then propose an outline for how the topic ought to be covered. They draft their articles, give and respond to peer feedback, take their work live on Wikipedia, and then keep improving their articles until the end of the term. Along the way, students will often work alongside experienced Wikipedia editors who offer critical feedback and help make sure articles meet Wikipedia's standards and follow its style conventions. Students who do great work may have the opportunity to have their articles featured on Wikipedia's main page. Solid articles will have a long term impact, with thousands of readers in the coming months and years.

Optionally, students may be asked to write a reflective paper about their Wikipedia experience, present their Wikipedia contributions in class, or develop their own ideas and arguments about their topics in a separate essay.

Learning objectives

• Develop writing skills :
• Increase media and information fluency :
• Improve critical thinking and research skills :
• Foster collaboration :
• Develop technical and communication skills :

Assignment type: Source-centered additions

Description

Learning objectives

Assignment type: Find and fix errors

Description

Learning objectives

Assignment type: Copyedit

Description

Learning objectives

Assignment type: Evaluate articles

Description

Learning objectives

Assignment type: Add images or multimedia

Description

Learning objectives

Assignment type: Something else

Description

Have another idea for incorporating Wikipedia into your class? We've found that these assignments work well, but they aren't the only way to do it. Get in touch, and we can talk things through: contactwikiedu.org.

Learning the Wikipedia essentials

To get started, you'll want to introduce your students to the basic rules of writing Wikipedia articles and working with the Wikipedia community. As their first Wikipedia assignment milestone, you can ask the students to create accounts and then complete the online training for students. This training introduces the Wikipedia community and how it works, demonstrates the basics of editing and walks students through their first edits, gives advice for selecting articles and drafting revisions, and covers some of the ways they can find help as they get started. It takes about an hour and ends with a certification step that you can use to verify that students completed the training.

Assignment milestones

• Create a user account and enroll on the course page
• Complete the online training for students. During this training, you will make edits in a sandbox and learn the basic rules of Wikipedia.
• To practice editing and communicating on Wikipedia, introduce yourself to any Wikipedians helping your class (such as a Wikipedia Ambassador), and leave a message for a classmate on their user talk page.

Will completion of the student training be part of your students' grades?

Getting started with editing Wikipedia

It is important to get students editing Wikipedia right away so that they become familiar with Wikipedia's markup ("wikisyntax", "wikimarkup", or "wikicode") and the basic mechanics of how editing and communication work. We recommend assigning a few small Wikipedia tasks early on.

Which contribution assignments would you like to include in your course?

Each of these is an optional assignment, which the instructor can select or unselect. By default, the first two are selected.

• Critique an article. Critically evaluate an existing Wikipedia article related to the class, and leave suggestions for improving it on the article’s talk page
• Add to an article. Using course readings or other relevant secondary sources, add 1–2 sentences of new information to a Wikipedia article related to the class. Be sure to integrate it well into the existing article, and include a citation to the source.
• Copyedit an article. Browse Wikipedia until you find an article that you would like to improve, and make some edits to improve the language or formatting.
• Illustrate an article. Find an opportunity to improve an article by creating and uploading an original photograph or video.

Choosing articles

Choosing the right (or wrong) articles to work on can make (or break) a Wikipedia writing assignment. Finding topics with the right balance between lack of prior good Wikipedia coverage and available literature from which to build new Wikipedia coverage can be tricky.

Not such a good choice

Articles that are "not such a good choice" for newcomers usually involve factors such as a lack of appropriate research material, highly controversial topics that may be well developed already, broad subjects or topics for which it is difficult to demonstrate notability.

• You probably shouldn't try to completely overhaul articles on very broad topics (e.g., Law).
• You should probably avoid trying to improve articles on topics that are highly controversial (e.g., Global Warming, Abortion, Scientology, etc.). You may be more successful starting a sub-article on the topic instead.
• Don't work on an article that is already of high quality on Wikipedia, unless you discuss a specific plan for improving it with other editors beforehand.
• Avoid working on something only sparsely covered by literature. Wikipedia articles cite secondary literature sources, so it is important that you have enough sources to provide a neutral point of view and be verifiable.
• Don't start articles with titles that imply an essay-like approach (e.g., The Effects That The Recent Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis has had on the US and Global Economics). These type of titles, and most likely the content too, may not be appropriate for an encyclopedia.

Good choice

• Choose a topic that is well established in its field, but only weakly represented on Wikipedia. The best choice is a topic for which a lot of literature is available but which isn't covered extensively on Wikipedia.
• Gravitate toward "stub" and "start" class articles. These articles often have only 1-2 paragraphs of information and are in need of expansion. Relevant WikiProject pages can provide a list of stubs that need improvement.
• Before creating a new article, do an in-depth search of related topics on Wikipedia to make sure your topic isn't already covered. Often, an article may already exist under another name, or the topic may be covered as a subsection of a broader article.

There are two recommended options for selecting articles for Wikipedia assignments:

• You (the instructor) prepare a list of appropriate 'non-existent', 'stub' or 'start' articles ahead of time for the students to choose from. If possible, you may want to work with an experienced Wikipedian to create the list. Each student chooses an article from the list to work on. Although this requires more preparation, it may help students start researching and writing their articles sooner.
• Each student explores Wikipedia and lists 3–5 topics on their Wikipedia user page that they interested in for their main project. You (the instructor) should approve article choices before students proceed to writing. Letting students find their own articles provides them with a sense of motivation and ownership over the assignment, but it may also lead to choices that are further afield from course material.