Faculty & Staff Resources: Wikipedia-Based Assignments

This LibGuide was created by Amanda Starkel, Information Commons and eLearning Librarian, for the spring 2016 Celebration of Innovation in Teaching. Here is a short description of their presentation topic:

This year, Wikipedia celebrated its 15th anniversary of making information free to anyone with an Internet connection. Open access is an incredibly important issue to the future of knowledge creation and distribution, but is considered a seemingly-niche issue and relegated to librarians and research funders. Wikipedia is a great way to introduce these ideas to students with a platform they understand and use often. 

Assignments centered on editing Wikipedia articles have been around for many years, focusing on improving short or poorly researched articles in the discipline in question. However, learning to edit Wikipedia is no small task and the necessary markup can take a long time for students to learn.

After participating in the #1lib1ref campaign this year, I realized there was an easy, but still impactful way to get students involved with Wikipedia. The idea behind #1lib1ref was for each librarian and information professional to find and add one source to an article that needed a citation. Using a tool called Citation Hunt to find articles needing citations, librarians were able to put their research skills to work finding a useful source. Students are absolutely capable of doing the same thing and this would be an excellent way for them to put their research skills to work. 

Learning how to do Wikipedia referencing can be somewhat difficult, but it’s not nearly as intensive as learning the full markup and organizing principles of the project.  This model could replace or augment an annotated bibliography assignment with real-world application.