Although Wikipedia has long been viewed with suspicion by many educators, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working hard to forge alliances with academia, to build a better reputation, but also to elicit strong content contribution for the collaborative online encyclopedia.
At the beginning of the school year, we wrote about Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program that introduced students to editing Wikipedia pages as part of their public policy college coursework. As its the end of the school year now, the Wikimedia Foundation has just published some of the results from its first year of the initiative.
College Credit for Editing Wikipedia
Over 800 students participated in editing Wikipedia over the course of the school year. In the fall term, this was one of the requirements for 14 college classes, and in the spring term, 33 courses were part of the initiative. If you’ve ever worked your way through grading stacks of college assignments, you can imagine the size of this contribution: the equivalent of 5800 pages – 11 reams of paper – full of new content added to Wikipedia. he chart at right shows the number of bytes our students added to articles. Over the course of the academic year, students have added 8.8 million bytes to the English version of Wikipedia.
But the Public Policy Initiative wasn’t simply about adding more content, it was about quality content, and the Wikimedia Foundation boasts that the public policy articles improved by 140%, based on a scoring system that experts use to assess materials. More number crunching on that to come, promises the Wikimedia Foundation.
The effort to get students involved with contribution to Wikipedia isn’t the only thing that the Wikimedia Foundation is doing to help promote itself in education. It has a Wikipedia Ambassadors program on , for example, that works both online and on campuses to help train and support students in editing Wikipedia. Wikimedia is also reaching out to faculty to help encourage them to make use of Wikipedia assignments.
Convincing the Faculty
The new relationships that are being forged between academia and Wikipedia aren’t just happening in the classroom. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at the recent call to action by the Association for Psychological Science, encouraging its members to take a more active role in contributing to Wikipedia’s articles on psychology – to “make sure Wikipedia–the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia–represents psychology fully and accurately.”
Although it might be hard to convince all university professors to contribute to Wikipedia (until it counts towards tenure, perhaps), there does seem to be a shift in the attitudes towards Wikipedia. For its part, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to expand both its ambassador program and aims to have editing projects be requirements in over 130 college classes next year.
