Online Communities and Crowds (Winter 2022)/Wikipedia assignment

Overview

This page provides information about the Wikipedia assignment for the course.

In general, you should rely on the course WikiEdu Dashboard for specifics about deadlines and individual milestones that you are asked to complete each week.

Over the first six weeks of the course, you will learn about and contribute to Wikipedia. For weeks 2-6, you will work together with a team to research, write, and publish a new article in Wikipedia on a topic of your (collective) choosing. As part of this process you will interact with other Wikipedia community members who are not part of the class. At the conclusion of week 6, you will also write a brief, individual reflection essay assessing your experience and connecting it to other material in the course.

The Wikipedia assignments are not precisely synchronized with the rest of the course material, but should provide you with many opportunities to reflect on the other cases, concepts, and challenges we are covering.

During the Wikipedia assignment, you will need to participate on Wikipedia each week. The teaching team will be able to see this activity and help you where appropriate. The discussion sections and full class meetings will also include time to discuss your experiences. Only the final component of the assignment (the reflection essay) includes anything that you will need to turn in via Canvas.

Please note: Since these assignments are stretched out over six+ weeks, we recommend that you take notes and reflect on your experience throughout. This will help you complete the reflection essay much more easily.

The reflection essay

The reflection essay serves as a capstone to the Wikipedia Assignment. In this essay, we ask you to reflect on and assess your experience with The Wikipedia Assignment in relation to the course material. In particular, we are eager to understand what went well, what went poorly, and how you connect your experience to other cases, concepts, and challenges raised in the course (for example, does your experience illustrate anything we talked about related to newcomer socialization? What kinds of design recommendations would you make to the designers of the WikiEdu Dashboard based on your experience?).

Format and style

The essay itself should be about 1000-1500 words (although a little less or a little more may be just fine). Successful reflection essays will combine personal experiences and perspective with thoughtful interpretation of course materials from readings and lectures. As always, it should be written in clear, persuasive prose and all sources should be properly acknowledged/documented. More detailed assessment criteria appear in the next section.

Assignment-specific notes on assessment

We will assess your individual and collective work in several ways throughout this assignment. All of the milestones and tasks involved in editing or completing learning modules about Wikipedia will all be assessed on a credit/no-credit basis. If you complete these tasks in a satisfactory way by the respective due date, you will receive full credit for each one. We (the teaching team) will evaluate the reflection essay and will assign each essay a letter grade based on the evaluation criteria described below.

Evaluation criteria specific to Wikipedia reflection essays:

A successful reflection essay will possess the following characteristics:

• Provide excellent writing and insights consistent with the general assessment rubric for written assignments in the course.
• Describe and comment on key aspects of your experience in Wikipedia.
• Asses your own work and that of your group.
• Connect your experience in Wikipedia to salient examples, themes, concepts, and/or challenge we have talked about in other parts of the course (e.g., newcomer socialization, motivation, governance, inclusion, identity, etc.).
• Identify aspects of your experience that could inform future research and/or design changes to The Wikipedia assignment and/or Wikipedia itself (such as the WikiEdu dashboard, the Visual Editor).

Getting help or advice about Wikipedia

The teaching team is happy to help you try and solve any issues you have with any aspect of the Wikipedia assignment. However, you should also know that our course has been assigned/gifted a standing offer of support from an expert Wikipedian: Ian Ramjohn. You can connect with Ian via his Wikipedia user page (you can leave a message on his talk page or he also provides his email address there).

Identifying potential topics for your articles

You will need to create a new article on Wikipedia with your teams. But how can you find a topic that is worthy of an article and also not already covered on Wikipedia? As it turns out, there are many resources to help you with this created by Wikipedia editors! A few suggestions and examples follow below.

In general, we recommend picking topics that more experienced Wikipedia editors have already identified as meeting the notability criteria for inclusion in the encyclopedia. When someone identifies a topic as potentially worthy of an article on Wikipedia, but no article exists, the text will appear as a red hyperlink (the red means that a page does not exist with that name). When you find red links, you have a hint that at least one other person thinks an article is worth creating on that topic. However, just because you or really anyone thinks a topic merits an article does not mean that it automatically will meet the notability criteria. Sometimes, it can be a struggle to convince other Wikipedia editors that a topic is sufficiently notable! We'll discuss all of this later, but suffice to say it's something to consider as you brainstorm topic ideas.

It's also worth noting that you can absolutely come up with topics on your own without using any of the lists below. If you have some knowledge about a topic that you and your group members agree to be notable and worthy of a Wikipedia article we encourage you to propose it as a topic!

Suggested lists of potential article topics

"Women in red" (WiR) is an initiative across Wikipedia that seeks to create and populate articles on notable women to address their disproportionate underrepresentation in the encyclopedia. The WiR project maintains a redlist index, which is an index of mostly red links for potential article topics that you might pursue.

WikiProject Women Scientists is also a great source for potential article topics. Emily Temple-Wood, the Wikipedia editor who Aaron mentioned in his introductory lecture, maintains a list of notable women scientists, many of whom do not yet have articles about them. Check out her list and investigate any of the names in red (hint: you'll need to look them up somewhere other than Wikipedia!) for ideas.

There is a general requested articles list as well. Again, dig through some of these topic areas and check out topics listed in red.

Last, but not least, you might get good ideas from the list of "stub" articles". Stubs are very short, very incomplete articles. For the purposes of the assignment, it's the only kind of existing article the teaching team will consider you working on. Please note that if you want to work on a stub, the teaching team will need to approve this and you'll be expected to expand any stub article substantially.