Wikipedia[1] is the largest encyclopedia in history, and the world's most-visited wiki. Wikipedia is now part of the online zeitgeist, and educators must deal with it. This essay is for teachers who share the author's belief that Wikipedia (or, more properly, the underlying process of mass collaboration that created it) will loom large in the future careers of students, this is a good thing, and students need to be ready to exploit it.
Benefits
The author believes students should master wiki editing, because wikis allow large numbers of remote users to collaborate more efficiently than they can with traditional methods that involve repeatedly carting millions of information workers between their homes and physical offices each day. This will become increasingly important as the world careens closer to running out of petroleum. Plus wikis are just fun to edit, and they let you collaborate with a wider variety of people at distances too great to span by physical travel even if transportation were free.
Wikis fill an important and hitherto unfilled void between e-mail and formal documents. In most organizations, there is a need for a simple way to let everyone edit information with future value on Web pages. Unfortunately, most tools for creating formal documents (such as DocBook, FrameMaker, etc.) are too difficult for casual use, and aren't set up for collaborative editing anyway. At the other extreme, E-mail is great for throw-away information, but not for information that needs to persist, because e-mail creates a giant disorganized pile of rough drafts of decaying information. Wikis allow everyone in an organization to work together to build an explicit expression of the organization's structure of knowledge. This author believes that in the future, more and more people will grasp this as the whole point of having organizations.
Students must emerge from school fully prepared to participate in the wiki revolution.
What Wikipedia is and is not
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not many other things.
Perhaps most importantly for newcomers to Wikipedia, Wikipedia is unlike anything else which most people have seen before. The result is that almost everyone makes incorrect assumptions about Wikipedia at first. Two of the more common and catastrophic assumptions:
- "There's nothing else like this." Wrong again. Wikipedia is a wiki, a special kind of Web site that is editable by its users. Wikipedia is merely the most well-known wiki; there are thousands more, specializing in different topics and uses, and having different policies, but in many cases using the same MediaWiki software and having a very similar look and feel. Unless your primary goal is to write an encyclopedia, there is likely to be some other wiki more suitable for you.
As easy as Wikipedia is to misunderstand, it is equally easy to edit, perhaps too easy, because Wikipedia's initially simple interface barely hints at Wikipedia's stupefying complexity. The result is that many new users have a rough start, as they unwittingly violate one policy or guideline after another, and see their contributions changed by others, or deleted outright.
Teacher, teach thyself
Before a person can teach a subject, that person must know the subject. Most people who know about Wikipedia (or wiki editing generally) learned what they know by editing on Wikipedia (or on other wikis).
A person who edits on Wikipedia learns by editing, by seeing what other editors do to his or her edits, and by reading the manuals. The more a person has edited, the more editing situations he or she will have run into, and hopefully learned from. Therefore, a user's edit count is a rough measure of the user's knowledge of Wikipedia. Roughly speaking, an edit count of 1,000 or more suggests an editor who has enough experience to be fairly competent - perhaps competent enough to teach others how to edit on Wikipedia.
Conversely: beginners in any subject are unlikely to make good teachers in that subject.
- Imagine a person who sits down to a piano for the very first time, trying to teach piano to others - since we all recognize the difference between someone who can play piano, and someone who cannot, we know how silly it would be for a piano beginner to try to teach piano.
If you want to teach your students to edit well on wikis, the first step is to gain wiki editing experience of your own.
Fortunately, the people who designed Wikipedia designed it with self-training in mind. The vast majority of expert Wikipedia users never attended any formal class to teach them how to edit on Wikipedia. You can attain any level of Wikipedia expertise merely by reading the extensive and generally well-written online help. Also see the Editor's index to Wikipedia, and read the questions and replies on the Help desk each day. To build and test your knowledge of Wikipedia, try answering questions on the Help desk.
Also see the book: Wikipedia - The Missing Manual (the full text is available here: H:TMM).
Choosing the right wiki
Wikipedia is one of the best wikis on which to gain wiki expertise via self-instruction, because Wikipedia has:
Therefore, Wikipedia may be a suitable wiki to help a teacher learn enough about wiki editing to teach others. The best way to start, generally, is to edit existing articles, rather than try to create new articles right away. Creating new articles that stick requires fairly advanced skills (or in the case of the author's first article, some plain dumb luck).
However, Wikipedia might not be the best instructional platform for people who need a teacher, such as young students, or adult students who only take a casual approach to the subject. That's because Wikipedia is building a real encyclopedia, and thus one cannot easily march students through a fixed set of instructional scenarios. Wikipedia is a live system rather than a training system, and all participants metaphorically go straight into battle.
For example, on Wikipedia we cannot teach people to create new articles by re-creating articles which already exist; the only way to teach someone how to create a new article on Wikipedia is to actually create a new article, and this requires a substantial knowledge of how to research a topic from scratch and write about it to encyclopedic standards. Furthermore, most of the "good" topics already have articles (Wikipedia has 6,821,208 articles at the moment), and the remaining topics to write about are becoming increasingly obscure, hard to research, and often not notable enough to escape deletion.
Encouraging your students to edit on Wikipedia without proper training can be like throwing them to the wolves, as they unwittingly violate one policy or another and have their work deleted by people they don't know.
Therefore, you might consider using another wiki to teach introductory wiki editing to your students.
Existing wikis
See:
Possibly there is some other wiki more suitable than Wikipedia for the exploratory editing your students may want to do, or for their non-encyclopedic writing.
Your own school wiki
Many schools have started their own wikis. Check to see if your school already has one. If your school has its own wiki, that is almost certainly the best choice for students in a wiki beginner class. You can set up standard lesson plans that teach basic wiki editing skills, without having to think up new scenarios for every student.
If your school does not already have a school wiki, you might consider starting one so you can bring your students along gently in a wiki environment that you control.
Starting your own wiki requires the skills of a system administrator. If you don't have these skills yourself, talk to the person who runs the computer lab at your school. He or she should easily be able to set up a school wiki. However, be aware that administering your own wiki requires substantial ongoing labor. Consider recruiting student volunteers to help maintain your school wiki.
You may choose to make your school wiki readable or even writeable by the general public, or you may choose to run your wiki safely behind your school's firewall. You may choose to set up both public and private wikis for your school. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Young students may need more protection from outsiders than adult students.
If you really want your students to edit on Wikipedia
It's possible that you have carefully examined other wikis, and you really do want your students to edit on Wikipedia. If so, then see: Wikipedia:School and university projects.
- Emphasize to your students that Wikipedia is perhaps the world's largest do it yourself project. Users expect other users to read the friendly manuals and learn enough on their own to pull their own weight, and avoid unduly burdening other users. Almost everything one needs to know to edit on Wikipedia is in writing, so the key to success on Wikipedia is the ability to search for, read, and then follow the written instructions.
- Reading the Help desk every day, and trying to answer questions are excellent ways to learn about Wikipedia. The Help desk steadily receives questions that illustrate the kinds of problems many new users will face. Help desk questions tend to be repetitive, so after reading the questions and answers over a few weeks, students will find they start to know the answers to a steadily increasing proportion of the new questions. This allows students to learn from other users' problems without having to run into the same problems themselves. A large community of experienced Wikipedia users monitor the Help desk, and will quickly correct any incorrect answers, so there is little danger from well-intentioned mistakes.
Getting help
There may be experienced Wikipedians in your locality willing to guest-lecture to your students.
To-do: research this and give links telling teachers how to find such people.
