October 26, 2007
Students Find That Wikipedians Are Tougher Graders Than Their Professor
Seattle — Anyone can add to Wikipedia, the popular online encylopedia, but whether a submission survives is determined entirely by its global community of users — and apparently those users are tougher graders than college professors.
That’s what a few students found out in a course taught last year by Martha Groom, an associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell. She required all of the 34 students in the course to write an article for their final class project and submit it to Wikipedia. By the end of the term, all of the papers had met her standards — in fact, she said the papers were generally the best she had ever had, since students worked harder knowing their work would be seen by a wide audience. But one of the papers was rejected almost immediately by Wikipedians, and four others were later removed by the community for not being up to the encyclopedia’s standards. [Editor’s note: Ms. Groom says in a comment below that the articles were removed “because they overlapped other, better researched articles.”]
Ms. Groom predicts that if the papers hadn’t been graded and revised before being posted on Wikipedia, the number of rejected articles would have been much higher — she predicts that 20 percent of the 34 articles would have failed Wikipedia’s test.
Ms. Groom discussed her experience with Wikipedia in the classroom at a session at Educause 2007, the annual education-technology conference, which wraps up here today.
One of the biggest challenges for students was finding a topic that hadn’t already been covered in Wikipedia, Ms. Groom said. One student ended up writing an entry on “Deforestation during the Roman period,” and another wrote an article titled “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” about the non-fiction book with that title.
Even the papers that didn’t get rejected sometimes met criticism by the Wikipedia community. “The biggest downside is that some Wikipedias are rude and would comment rather ruthlessly in the discussions,” said Ms. Groom.
She argues that the process was a strong learning experience. “They have a much deeper understanding of the research process,” she said.
Should colleges be participating in Wikipedia, which many complain is a hotbed for inaccuracy?
“Is there crap on Wikipedia? Sure there is,” said Ms. Groom in an interview. “So let’s be part of making it better.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday October 26, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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It’s amazing to me how little the Chronicle and apparently Martha Groom know about Wikipedia. The reason many of her students’ articles were rejected was because their topics were not encyclopedic, not because of some “quality” standards. I have to shake my head, that this is the conclusion of a college professor, and that this is the state of journalism at the Chronicle.
They got one thing right — that Wikipedians are rude; but Young even spelled that word wrong.
— Gregory Kohs Oct 27, 04:24 PM #
I’d like to correct a mistaken impression created by the slant in the article. I did not say that the articles were deleted due to quality, but rather stated that it was because they overlapped other, better researched articles. The focus of our presentation was on the use of Wikipedia as an authentic learning experience, which included many aspects of learning about producing quality articles (including appropriate and verifiable sources, keeping a neutral voice and an unbiased presentation, as well as many other aspects that do contribute to the quality of an article). I’d also take this opportunity to explain that the students’ work was not “meeting my standards” necessarily before being posted, and thus it is not right to say that Wikipedians are necessarily “tougher graders,” but rather that Wikipedians’ responses to the posts my students made reinforced the lessons we try to teach about the elements that must be combined to create a good article.
Thanks for bringing forward these reflections, but please don’t assume that we know little about Wikipedia. Indeed, we did a great deal to learn about it, contribute thoughtfully, and many of our students are now regular contributors!
Martha Groom
— Martha Groom Oct 27, 10:11 PM #
I asked my students to do a similar Wikipedia project last semester. While writing research papers for my English Comp class they were writing articles on terminology from our central text, Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. I mention this because Wikipedia has its own generic conventions and students were able to juxtapose the writing they were doing for me, in English, to that for Wikipedia (which includes a community of readers and writers that isn’t trying to write researched English essays). The general point was to see how circumstance shapes the writing and, specifically, see collective intelligence in action.
Like Martha Groom’s students, many of mine, too, had their articles tagged for deletion or redirected, but, even better, they received constructive feedback and proofreading and editing (at the sentence-level) by wikians and had full-on collaborative authoring experiences with people outside the class. So, “Wikipedians’ responses to the posts my students made reinforced the lessons we try to teach about the elements that must be combined to create a good article.” Right on! And it also demonstrated how writing a research paper in my class differed from a encyclopedic article and how a community establishes and maintains the ways of doing and being. Further, it demonstrated that writing isn’t merely a technical or general skill that is transferable from one situation to the next and that just because I’m called a writing teacher, doesn’t mean I know everything about writing everywhere.
I’d love to hear more about your work with wikis, Martha, and will try to contact you offsite.
— Rik Hunter Oct 29, 09:39 AM #