APS Wikipedia Initiative:Using Wikipedia Writing in

Psychology Classes

Rosta Farzan & Robert Kraut

Human Computer Interaction Institute

Carnegie Mellon University

Robert Kraut– Professor, Social psychologist & human-computer interaction,

Carnegie Mellon– Used Wikipedia writing in two courses

Rosta Farzan– Assistant professor, Information sciences, University of Pittsburgh– Primary developer for Association for Psychological

Science/Wikipedia Initiative tools Paula Marentette

– Professor of Psychology, University of Alberta– User Wikipedia writing in one class

Jami Mathewson– Higher education initiative, WikiMedia Foundation

Who we are

Introduction to Wikipedia

The APS Wikipedia Initiative

Why use Wikipedia writing assignments in class

Tips for creating an assignment

Challenges

Resources– WMF Educational Initiative

– APS Wikipedia Initiative Portal

Outline

Why use Wikipedia writing assignments in your class?

Improves what the general public knows about psychological science

Provides high quality learning experiences for students

Wikipedia is one of the top five visited web sites

Wikipedia has over 400 million unique visitors per month comprising 11.7 billion page request a month, which represents 5% of the world population

Highly popular

Major source of information on most psychological concepts

Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were impoverished or out of date

A Stub

• Virtually no content

• 350 words

• No references

Wikipedia: Behind the article covers

APS is calling on its Members to support the Association’s mission to deploy the power of Wikipedia to represent scientific psychology as fully and as accurately as possible and thereby to promote the free teaching of psychology worldwide.

Initiative is producing gratifying amounts of high quality work 126 PhD psychologists 36 psychology classes with 752 students Collectively improved more than 1,250 Wikipedia

articles (~18%) and wrote over 3,000 pages of text

Students do more work than PhD psychologists at comparable quality

Users # editing articles Articles edited Words added

All 603 1079 826,636PhDs 67 256 107,267Students 535 749 720,021

• Original

• 1 article combing

bio and theory

• Sections: 7

• Words: 831

• Images: 0

• References: 5

• External links: 7

• New

• 2 pages with bio

separated from theory

• Sections: 27

• Words: 5,669

• Images: 1

• References: 35

• External links: 18

The assignment is valuable for students

Strongly motivating– An authentic writing assignment– Their work is seen by thousands

Learning opportunities– Mastering a topic in psychology– Reading the research literature– Writing for the general public– Learning how Internet knowledge is produced

Recognition – Did You Know?

Topic of the article they edited

Norms and culture of Wikipedia community

Technical aspects of Wikipedia

Students found Wikipedia assignments effective in learning

Students are highly motivated and proud that their work will be a public document that they can share with parents and friends and it is really beneficial for them to write it.

Quotes from faculty

Majority of students take the assignment very seriously and they are very excited about the broad audience and they work really hard on the article….The assignment helped them become more informed about how Wikipedia works and even though they were junior students their contribution improved the articles substantially (an important contribution to the field)

Quotes from faculty

Class size & level– Typical is upper-level undergrad lecture or

seminar, with ~20 students– Graduate seminars– 1,700-student introductory class

Small or substantial contributions

Write solo or in small team.– Some evidence that team writing is most effective

Wikipedia assignments came in a variety of formats

Edit an article related to class– Improve a poor quality psychology article to “good article”

status– Write a new article– Add a new section– Add references

Review classmate’s work (in a minority of classes) Write a reflective essay

– The rationale for article edits– What you learned about psychology– What you learned about Wikipedia community

Typical Wikipedia assignments

Intro to Wikipedia & the assignment Students get familiar with Wikipedia & editing

– Create user page, write on a talk page– Read tutorials & policy pages

Select article– From list precompiled by instructor– Identified by student, with instructor’s permission

Evaluate the selected article– Analyze areas for improvement in the article– Identify the relevant, current literature– Propose plan for improvement– Describe plans on article’s talk page

Typical time-line

Revise out of public view– Wikipedia sandbox– Word or Google document

Get feedback from peers & instructor– In class – On-line– Explicit peer review

Typical time-line (cont)

Post updates to the public article If appropriate, nominate for ‘Did You Know” review.

– New article– Existing article expanded 5x

If appropriate, nominate for ‘Good Article’ status Respond to community comments & revise Write self-reflection essay Grade

Typical time-line (cont.)

Letter grades for quality of contribution – Final Article– Reflective essay

Relaxed grading: pass/fail for effort Detailed grading for different pieces of the

assignment– E.g., Points for creating account, creating user

page, picking article, critiquing article, planning edits, reviewing peers, final article, reflective essay

Typical grading rubrics

Students need to learn:– A psychology topic in depth– Wikipedia technology for editing– Wikipedia norms & culture

Faculty spend more effort than on a typical term-paper assignment– Students receive the most feedback from their

professor and less from other students or Wikipedia community

– Since article is a public document, faculty feel some responsible

Wikipedia editing can be hard

Neutral point of view & no original content– Terms papers and literature reviews should make

an argument– Wikipedia articles should only include information

from authorities sources– Editors shouldn’t draw conclusions or argue a

position

Clash between academic and Wikipedia values over writing goal

Scientists value peer reviewed journal articles Wikipedians prefer secondary sources

– “Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a review article, monograph, or textbook is better than a primary research paper”

– “Articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This means that we only publish the opinions of reliable authors, and not the opinions of Wikipedians who have read and interpreted primary source material for themselves.”

If your students get this response, push back on an article’s talk page

Clash between academic and Wikipedia values over reliable sources

Follow the Bold-Revert-Discuss cycle If feedback is reasonable, accept the criticisms & fix

problems If feedback is not reasonable,

– Revert unwarranted changes– Argue your position on the article talk page

Responding to feedback

30

DEMO

Signup

Signup

Your profile

Finding articles

Register a course

Tracking students’ activity

Tracking students’ activity

Constructing course timeline

Following editors/articles/classes

Help pages

Step by step tutorials

NSF funded project We built tools to support classes in selecting

articles, editing & interacting with the Wikipedia community

Our research evaluates their effectiveness – Surveys for you and your students– Random assignment experiments with tools

Some features might be available to a random set of students

Opt-out if you do not want your class to participate

Support for research

Robert Kraut, robert.kraut@cmu.edu

Rosta Farzan, rfarzan@pitt.edu

Questions?