APS Wikipedia Initiative:
Using Wikipedia Writing in
Psychology Classes
Rosta Farzan & Robert Kraut
Human Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
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
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
Why use Wikipedia writing assignments
in your class?

Improves what the general public knows
about psychological science

Provides high quality learning experiences
for students
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
Major source of information on most
psychological concepts
Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology
were impoverished or out of date
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
Users
# editing articles Articles edited
Words added
All
PhDs
Students
603
67
535
826,636
107,267
720,021

1079
256
749
Students do more work than PhD psychologists at
comparable quality
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?
Students found Wikipedia
assignments effective in learning

Topic of the article they
edited

Norms and culture of
Wikipedia community

Technical aspects of
Wikipedia
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.
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)
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
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
Typical time-line


Intro to Wikipedia & the assignment
Students get familiar with Wikipedia & editing
–
–

Select article
–
–

Create user page, write on a talk page
Read tutorials & policy pages
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 (cont)

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 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
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
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
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 factchecking 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
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
DEMO
30
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
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
Questions?

Robert Kraut, robert.kraut@cmu.edu

Rosta Farzan, rfarzan@pitt.edu