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"Wikipedia: it’s not the evil elephant in the library reading room". Talk given by Andrew Gray & Nancy Graham at the LILAC 2014 conference.
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Wikipedia in the library - the elephant in the (reading) room?
Nancy Graham, University of RoehamptonAndrew Gray, British Antarctic Survey
the project
• A collaboratively-written encyclopedia
• A synthesis of published material
• Aiming for neutrality and verifiability ...not editorial authority
• Free to use, distribute and reuse
the numbers
• Thirteen years old
• 30,000,000 articles in 280 languages
• Growing by 8-10,000 new articles/day
• Reaching 500,000,000 readers/month...or 7% of the world’s population
the problem
“We have a problem. The kids these days are reading too many encyclopedias.”
the opportunity
• Users are actively seeking out the resource• “Don’t do that!” is never very effective
• This is a perfect teaching moment– how to tell the good from the bad?– thinking critically about online material– engaging with the means of production– what are we actually saying “don’t” to?
mapping to ANCILhttp://ccfil.pbworks.com/f/ANCIL_final.pdf
ANCIL Strand Example learning outcomes from ANCIL
Wikipedia related activities
1 – Transition from school to HE
Assess your current info-seeking behaviour and compare to experts in your discipline
Using a Wikipedia article on your topic, use the references to identify familiar and unfamiliar sources.
3 – Developing academic literacies
Identify appropriate terminology, use of language and academic idiom in your discipline
Assess and compare the quality of 3 short Wikipedia articles (one poorly written)
4 – Mapping and evaluating the information landscape
Develop evaluative criteria for recognizing and selecting trustworthy sources of academic quality in your discipline
Compare a Wikipedia page with a traditional encyclopaedia. Compare with excerpts from textbooks and journals.
7 – Ethical dimension of information
Summarise the key ways you can use and share information without infringing another’s rights
Students asked to find suitable images for re-use using Wikimedia Commons.
8 – Presenting and communicating knowledge
Use language appropriately in your academic writing
Discuss the importance of writing objectively in Wikipedia
9 – Synthesising information and creating new knowledge
Assess the value of new information objectively in the context of your work
Students to debate a topic using information from Wikipedia
10 – Social dimension of information
Transfer the skills of finding, critically evaluating and deploying information to the workplace
Ask students to use only freely available sources from Wikipedia to answer a subject query, then search using subscription sources.
some thoughts
• On average... quality is acceptable• 2005 study: four errors in WP for three in Britannica• 2011 study (in English, Spanish, Arabic):
“…the Wikipedia articles in this sample scored higher overall than the comparison articles with respect to accuracy, references, style/ readability and overall judgment…”
• But millions of articles = millions of problems• Radically transparent editorial process• Signs are there for alert readers
looking for the hints
Article tags
Talk pages and histories
Corner icons - locked (a red flag) - quality ratings (positive)
...and, most basic of all, style
moving onwards
Footnotes
Internal navigation
the projects• Wikipedia Education Program
– Encouraging teachers to engage with WP– Content creation, critical assessment, etc.
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal • Online courses
– “Writing Wikipedia” MOOC (now fourth round)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WIKISOO
• Outreach resources– Wide range of past projects for different audiences– Some printed/printable material available
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf
11http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Evaluating_Wikipedia_article_quality_(Bookshelf)
case studies
• Head & Eisenberg (2010): survey of the ways students use Wikipedia as a resource
• Sormuen & Lehtiö (2011): students wrote Wikipedia articles, which were examined to study their citing/plagarising habits
• Konieczny (2012): survey of five years of teaching using Wikipedia in various ways
• Roth, Davis & Carver (2013): examination of student engagement with Wikipedia-related teaching projects
...and many other examples of university projects
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Contact details
Nancy Graham, University of RoehamptonEmail: nancy.graham@roehampton.ac.uk Twitter: @msnancygraham
Andrew Gray, British Antarctic SurveyEmail: anday@bas.ac.uk Twitter: @generalising
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