Writing History on Wikipedia: Students Constructing Knowledge in Collaborative Space

by Mills Kelly, History and Center for History and New Media

Not long ago, the faculty in the History Department at Middlebury College banned (or at least tried to ban) their students from using Wikipedia as a source for history essays. Leaving aside the question of whether or not banning a web resource might actually work, plenty of professors, regardless of discipline, would agree with the goal of encouraging students to veer away from malleable sources such as Wikipedia. Why then, you might ask, do I require students in virtually every class I teach to write for Wikipedia?

The first and most important reason is that, unlike my colleagues at Middlebury, I make the assumption that my students will use Wikipedia no matter what I say. Given that reality, I’ve decided to meet my students where they live academically. One thing I’ve learned from using this assignment over the past three years is that few students understand just how malleable Wikipedia is. When they complete the assignment I describe, every one of my students understands how the most popular online information resource actually works.

The other reason why I want my students to write for Wikipedia is that I want them to understand the difference between an encyclopedia, a scholarly monograph, and a primary source – a distinction that escapes many of them when they first arrive in my classes. There is nothing like writing in a particular form to understand that form, and so by the end of the semester they at least know that an encyclopedia is not a primary source, nor is it particularly scholarly.

Finally, I use the assignment as a way of opening up a discussion about the construction of knowledge in public space. What does it mean when information is produced collaboratively? How might we assess the “wisdom of the crowd” as compared to the wisdom of credentialed (or uncredentialed) experts? Given the reality that more and more information available online is produced, at least in part, with input from the general public, I want my students to begin to grapple with what these issues might mean for their own work as scholars.

My assignment is actually rather simple:

• Each student must select a topic from the past that either does not have an entry in Wikipedia or is only represented by a minimal entry (a “stub” in Wiki-speak). If they are working with a stub, they must substantially elaborate the entry that they have chosen. I let them choose the topic of their entry because I want them to write about something they actually care about, rather than something I might assign to them. This approach also has the merit of forcing them to do some research on Wikipedia to see what is and is not covered already.
• Each entry must have sources (otherwise the Wikipedia bots delete it within minutes), each entry must link to other related entries, and the students must also edit those related entries to link back to the one they have created. I ask them to insert a graphic as well, but have made this part of the assignment optional because the Wikipedia syntax that governs images is often daunting for many of my students.
• Once their entry is created, they are enjoined from editing it further. Instead, their task during the course of the semester is to sit back and watch their entry, observing what does (or does not) happen to it. Is it edited heavily? Is it deleted for being insufficiently notable (a standard of evaluation in Wikipedia)? Does anything happen to it at all? And if so, what might the students make of those changes?
• The concluding activity of the semester is a brief essay on what my student-authors have learned about writing for Wikipedia and about the construction of knowledge in a collaborative public space. These essays are often rich with frustration – “How could my entry have been deleted?” or “Why would someone make those changes to what I wrote?” But sometimes they are filled with joy. The happiest of my students is one whose entry ended up on the Wikipedia homepage as the featured entry of the day. If she remembered nothing else about my course, that particular student would remember that for one day something she wrote was viewed by millions of people. Her entry, by the way, was on David and Catherine Birnie, husband and wife serial killers in Australia.