APS Wikipedia Initiative: Using Wikipedia Writing in Psychology Classes

1. APS Wikipedia Initiative:Using Wikipedia Writing in Psychology Classes Rosta Farzan & Robert Kraut Human Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University

2. Who we are • 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

3. Outline • 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

4. Why use Wikipedia writing assignments in your class? • Improves what the general public knows about psychological science • Provides high quality learning experiences for students

5. Highly popular • 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

6. Major source of information on most psychological concepts

7. Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were impoverished or out of date • A Stub • Virtually no content • 350 words • No references

8. Wikipedia: Behind the article covers

9. 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.

10. 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

12. New • 2 pages with bio separated from theory • Sections: 27 • Words: 5,669 • Images: 1 • References: 35 • External links: 18 • Original • 1 article combing bio and theory • Sections: 7 • Words: 831 • Images: 0 • References: 5 • External links: 7

13. 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

14. Recognition – Did You Know?

15. Students found Wikipedia assignments effective in learning • Topic of the article they edited • Norms and culture of Wikipedia community • Technical aspects of Wikipedia

16. Quotes from faculty 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.

17. 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)

18. Wikipedia assignments came in a variety of formats • 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

19. Typical Wikipedia assignments • 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

20. Typical time-line • 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

21. Typical time-line (cont) • Revise out of public view • Wikipedia sandbox • Word or Google document • Get feedback from peers & instructor • In class • On-line • Explicit peer review

22. 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

23. Typical grading rubrics • 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

24. Wikipedia editing can be hard • 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

25. Clash between academic and Wikipedia values over writing goal • 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

26. Clash between academic and Wikipedia values over reliable sources • 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

27. Responding to feedback • 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

28. Demo

29. Signup

30. Signup

31. Your profile

32. Finding articles

33. Register a course

34. Tracking students’ activity

35. Tracking students’ activity

36. Constructing course timeline

37. Following editors/articles/classes

38. Help pages

39. Step by step tutorials

40. Support for research • 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

41. Questions? • Robert Kraut, robert.kraut@cmu.edu • Rosta Farzan, rfarzan@pitt.edu