Online Communities and Crowds (Spring 2025)/Wikipedia assignment

Useful links

• Enrollment link for the course WikiEdu dashboard (if needed, the enrollment code is "occ-nu-2025").
• WikiEdu Dashboard timeline.
• Canvas submission page for the Wikipedia Advising Report.

Overview

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

Because this course covers such a range of different online communities, it's helpful to have one online community that can serve as a sort of common object to think about and engage with. In this course, that community is going to be Wikipedia.

In the first weeks of the class, you will be asked to learn about Wikipedia, its norms, rules, and processes. With this knowledge, you will all be asked to research and substantially extend an encyclopedia article on Wikipedia. To do this, I will use material from the Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEdu) to help you learn how to participate in Wikipedia. As part of this process, you will interact with other Wikipedia community members who are not part of the class.

You will need to participate in Wikipedia each week as part of this project. You should rely on the course WikiEdu Dashboard for specifics about deadlines and individual milestones that you are asked to complete each week. The instructor as well as a WikiEdu volunteer will be able to see this activity and help you if appropriate.

During the Wikipedia assignment, there will be some exercises or milestones due every Friday. These correspond to steps in a process of getting involved in Wikipedia. Most weeks, this will involve completing learning modules and assignments via the Wikiedu Dashboard for our 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. I plan to take time to discuss our progress and experience with Wikipedia and to connect it explicitly to the theoretical concepts we are covering.

Although this means we'll be spending a lot of time talking about Wikipedia, the goal here is to build and apply critical skills about online communities in general. Wikipedia's incredible openness and impact make it an excellent place to learn and explore the ideas of the course, but the goal is always to engage with the broader principles and underlying concepts and practice their applications.

Finally, as a dress rehearsal for the Community Advising Report at the end of the quarter, I will ask you all to think through and offer advice on a major problem facing Wikipedia. I ask you to post your report as a subpage of your Wikipedia user page and to submit a link to this subpage via Canvas (so that I can provide feedback and a grade there). Details on the report, submission guidelines, and assessment appear below.

Wikipedia Assignment schedule

In general, activities for each week are due by Friday (of that week). See the WikiEdu Dashboard for specific assignments and most up-to-date/accurate deadlines):

Week 1: Create an account, join the course page, learn some basics

Week 2: Learn some rules, evaluate an article, choose possible article topics

Week 3: Edit existing articles/citations, finalize article selection, find sources for your article

Week 4: Start more substantial editing your article

Week 5: Peer review two article, continue improving your article.

Week 6: Respond to peer review, polish your article.

Week 7: Final revisions to articles; Wikipedia Advising Report (1000 words max) due.

Assessment of your work on the weekly exercises

In addition to the development and editing of the article you choose to edit, the assignment involves weekly exercises and milestones that you are asked to complete on Wikipedia. The WikiEdu dashboard for the course will help keep track of all of these activities.

I will use the following criteria as a rubric for assessing your work on the contributions made to Wikipedia:

1. Substantial new article text demonstrates effort and fluency in Wikipedia norms — A student fluent in Wikipedia norms will have created an substantial article or brought an existing article at least one quality class higher in the eyes of most Wikipedia members by adding new encyclopedic text, adhering to policies on tone, adding references for statements from reliable third party sources, and so on.
2. Peer reviews of other student were thoughtful, critical, and constructive.
3. Deadlines for tasks #1-7 were met in a way that allowed for the interactive and collaborative aspects of the class (e.g., draft was published to allow for reviews, peer reviews were made on time, article was published live on time, and so on).

Because Wikipedia is a very public project, it is possible that your contributions may be questioned, deleted, or updated by other editors who are not members of the class. Please don't worry, this is a very normal part of working on Wikipedia (though it can be stressful or confusing and we can certainly talk about that). All of your edits are preserved and tracked by the Media Wiki software and through the WikiEdu dashboard. Any assessment of your work will not be affected by the behavior of random strangers on the Internet.

Identifying 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!

Lists of potential article topics

A great place to start finding potential article topics is the list of "stub" articles". Stubs are very short, very incomplete articles. On the upside, someone has probably already looked at them and decided the topic is worth including/covering, so you're less likely to face pushback on the notability of the subject in the first place.

If you feel compelled to work on totally de-novo topics that do not yet have an article, that's great. Just brace yourself for a little extra work and possibly for questions (from other Wikipedia volunteers!) about whether or not the topic of your article meets Wikipedia's notability criteria.

"Women in red" (WiR) is an initiative across Wikipedia that seeks to create and populate articles on notable women to address their disproportionate under-representation 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, a 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.

Remember, just because someone thinks an article should exist is no guarantee that you or others will agree with them. You need to use some judgment in selecting an article that is interesting (according to you), feasible (for you to develop), and meets the standards of inclusion in Wikipedia (according to you as well as other Wikipedians).

Wikipedia Advising Report

Due

May 15, 5pm

Deliverables

• 1,000 words (max) report submitted as a subpage of your Wikipedia userpage.
• A link to your report submitted via Canvas

Prompt

Members of the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) are brainstorming approaches for using generative AI and large language models to create Wikipedia content. There is a page on Wikipedia about these ideas that might be useful to get a sense of what people are considering.

For this assignment, I want you to imagine that the WMF staff has contacted you seeking recommendations on managing the impact of generative AI tools on the Wikipedia online community. For context, the WMF's mission is:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation 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.

For this assignment, it's important to understand that the mission contains both a desire to produce high-quality educational material and a goal to engage people in its production.

Your job is to produce a short report (1000 words max) drawing on materials from this class to advise these leaders about how they ought to understand this challenge (generative AI) and how they might progress toward addressing its impact in their community. The best insights will draw on intelligent reflections on the themes and materials of this course to make concrete, specific, and sophisticated recommendations that carefully consider potential drawbacks and unintended consequences. You are welcome to evaluate the specific suggestions in the brainstorming page or suggest new approaches.

Please note: You do not need to draw on resources beyond the course materials (readings, lectures, assignments, case discussions, etc.) to produce your report. However, you may feel free to do so.

Submission

Deliverables (due by May 16, 5pm)

• A 1,000 word report created and saved as a subpage of your Wikipedia user page.
• You will also need to submit the URL of the subpage of your report via Canvas

For example, I would create mine with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aaronshaw/Report as the URL. Of course, you should replace "Aaronshaw" with your Wikipedia username. You can also go to your user page by clicking on your username on Wikipedia and then adding "/Report" at the end of the URL. When you go to that page, it will say Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact name. You can create a new page by just clicking the "Create" tab on that page. However you do it, when you're done, you can paste the resulting URL into Canvas.

Please note that Wikipedia pages can support references, footnotes, headers, and formatting options and you will have learned to use these features as part of your work on your Wikipedia articles.

Caveat: To avoid losing any work, I strongly recommend drafting your report somewhere other than the browser-based editor of Wikipedia.

Assessment

First and foremost, your report will be evaluated on the degree to which it provides useful, informed, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will also be evaluated on the degree to which you engage with the course material. See the assessment rubric for written work for details on my expectations regarding the content of papers. A successful essay will do the following things:

1. Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?
2. Justify your recommendations regarding the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from someone on the internet?
3. To the extent it is relevant, feel free to comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. When you do so, connect your experiences in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered.

You will receive comments and feedback on your assignment. Also, please note that this assignment is shorter but extremely similar to what you will do in your Community Advising Report at the end of the quarter. As a result, you can treat this as a "mid-term" and make adjustments to your approach based on feedback.

Additional guidance and FAQ

There's no minimum word count, but I'd strongly suggest you take advantage of the space you're given. Generally speaking, you can say more, be more insightful, and demonstrate more fluency (all the things that figure in assessment) if you use more space.

Your audience is Wikipedians who may read your report. You don't need to define things to prove to anyone that you've done the reading. You should define terms if you think an audience of Wikipedians (who have not taken the class) will be lost/confused otherwise. You should attribute quotes, concepts, or key ideas to sources appropriately (yes, use citations to do this). Use your judgment to make a compelling, well-reasoned, and well-supported argument. The goal is to show that you are fluent in the course material. A fluent person does not try to use every word in a language; they simply use the most appropriate ones.

In terms of structure, please adopt a format that will best support the substance of your argument and ideas. Something with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion is reliable and useful. If you feel it's better or useful to deviate from that, go for it. Please don't put the numbered questions in your essay.

There is no specific guidance regarding style (e.g., APA, Chicago, etc.) or how to format the references. Ensure others can read the paper clearly and find any papers you cite.