Editing Wikipedia as Critical Digital Pedagogy

WIKIPEDIA AS CRITICAL DIGITAL PEDAGOGY

Adeline Koh Associate Professor & Director of DH@Stockton

Stockton University

@adelinekoh

REWRITE WIKIPEDIA

• Editing Wikipedia as an educational and political act

• Hands up—how many of you will admit to checking Wikipedia when looking up something you don’t know? :D

• Postcolonial Digital Humanities Project (dhpoco.org)

@adelinekoh

NEUTRALITY & BIAS• Wikimedia Wikipedia’s Editor’s Survey of 2011: “if there is a

typical Wikipedia editor, he has a college degree, is 30-years-old, is computer savvy but not necessarily a programmer, doesn’t actually spend much time playing games, and lives in US or Europe.”

• Marginalized groups and their histories (people outside of the United States and Europe, people of color, poor people, women, LGBT people, and disabled people) are less represented (or less well represented) on Wikipedia.

WHY THE REWRITING WIKIPEDIA PROJECT?- March 2013, inspired by the #toofew feminist movement to engage Wikipedia- Global Women Write In Events. 3 so far.

#GWWI 1: April 2012, #GWWI II: March 2013, #GWWI III: October 2014

@adelinekoh

WIKIPEDIA’S CONSERVATISM• Reproduces conservatism in print knowledge

• “Notability”

• “Verifiability, Not Truth”

• Stephen Colbert, “Truthiness,” “Wikiality”

• “Wikiality” <—> Said’s Colonial Library?

@adelinekoh

CRITICAL DIGITAL PEDAGOGY• “Critical Digital Pedagogy: an approach to teaching and learning predicted on

fostering agency and empowering learners (explicitly and implicitly critiquing oppressive power structures” — Jesse Stommel

• “Critical Pedagogy”—Paulo Freire, bell hooks

• Freire: Against “banking model” of education in which “education becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”

• hooks: learning as community

EDITING WIKIPEDIA

• Editing Wikipedia as Critical Digital Pedagogy

• Involving students in the creation of knowledge

• Getting students to be familiar with rules of (and understand the problems with) online communities

• Getting students to understand bias in knowledge

LET’S BEGIN!Go to http://en.wikipedia.org

@adelinekoh

ADVICE:Don’t use your real name as your username.

You can change it later once you get more comfortable.

@adelinekoh

START WITH: WIKIPEDIA TUTORIALhttp://tinyurl.com/wikiptutorial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial

@adelinekoh & @roopikarisam

PLAY IN THE SANDBOXPractice writing summary, saving, creating section headers (use equal sign = on both sides to make something a header, different

numbers of signs surrounding gives you different sizes of headers). A TOC is automatically created if you have 4 + sections.

Use “show preview” to see how your page looks before publishing and use “edit summary” to narrate the kinds of changes that you’ve

@adelinekoh

THINGS THAT WILL HELP MAKE YOUR ENTRIES “STICKY”

• Make minor grammatical and word choice cleanup on non-controversial articles, as they help to establish that you’re a “good faith” member of the community. They also help your input be taken more seriously if you become embroiled in larger disputes later.

@adelinekoh

IDEAS FOR EDITING?

• For a list of ideas about what to start editing, go to: http://tinyurl.com/gwwi3.

• Make small “good faith” edits

• Start with articles/stubs rather than articles that have awards

@adelinekoh

MORE TIPS• Stick around for at least 4 days, making small edits to become an

“established editor”—most people don’t even stick around that long!

• When making a change that requires evidence, find good secondary sources. If not, your change might be considered vandalism (which does happen quite often)

• Maintain a “neutral” POV

• Wikipedia as a “tertiary” source; meaning you can only reproduce established, printed knowledge

@adelinekoh