APS Wikipedia Initiative: Using Wikipedia Writing in Psychology Classes Rosta Farzan & Robert Kraut Human Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University
Feb 24, 2016
APS Wikipedia Initiative:Using Wikipedia Writing in
Psychology Classes
Rosta Farzan & Robert Kraut
Human Computer Interaction InstituteCarnegie 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Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were impoverished or out of date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 addedAll 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