Collaborative group work and increased diversity through Wikipedia editing

Laurel Smith Stvan

doi:10.3765/plsa.v6i2.5101

Abstract

This paper details how a collaborative assignment to edit Wikipedia entries on linguistic topics can help students practice and improve their research skills and navigate group work through an engaged learning task. It describes strategies for group formation, types of cognitive skills that were deployed in the task, equitable distribution of workload and ways that individual student contributions to the project were tracked and assessed, along with project feedback from student reflections. The editing task is also shown as a way to increase gender diversity and widen the language background of the site’s editors.

Highlights

New types of classroom research projects and discipline-specific service-learning projects (Villeneuve 2019; Rotramel et al 2019) have been emerging through the help of the Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEdu)’s efforts to bring skills in editing Wikipedia articles into the university
These include highlighting open access and science communication to promote outreach to the larger community; convincing academe of the validity of Wikipedia to practicing scholarly research; learning about Wikipedia’s own plagiarism and copyright rules; discussing content gaps within the discipline of Linguistics; using the remote learning opportunities that the editing dashboard provides for both individual learning and group projects; and improving the diversity of Wikipedia editors
While students may not be ready to create new summaries of class topics at the start, they can still build up pieces that improve a page. Their project goal is to work with a group of classmates to research, expand the content, and build up background sources for an existing Wikipedia page on a linguistics topic

Summary

Introduction

New types of classroom research projects and discipline-specific service-learning projects (Villeneuve 2019; Rotramel et al 2019) have been emerging through the help of the Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEdu)’s efforts to bring skills in editing Wikipedia articles into the university.

Results

Conclusion