the future of wikipedia in education
DESCRIPTION
Updated version of a talk profiling how Wikipedia can improve student experiences in Academica, and howTRANSCRIPT
Jake OrlowitzUser:Ocaasi
[email protected]@JakeOrlowitz
Wikimedia Foundation GranteeWiki Project Med Foundation
Wikipedia Administrator
All content under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
The Future of Wikipedia in Education
An early study in the journal Nature said that in 2005, Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[2]
Between 2008 and 2012, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology,[5] toxicology,[6] oncology,[7] pharmaceuticals,[8] and psychiatry[9] comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high standard.
--Reliability of Wikipedia, Wikipedia
●50% to 90% of physicians
●35 to 70% of pharmacists
●94% of medical students use Wikipedia
Ubiquitous usage
Wikipedia’s scale30m articles, 4m English16 million images
8000 views per second
500 million unique visitors per month3.7 billion monthly mobile pageviews
2.1 billion edits, 700 million English
Wikipedia’s missionImagine a world in which every person on the planet shares in the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we’re doing.
(for free, in the language of their choice)
Wikipedia’s volunteers20 million registered users
120,000 active editors
1,400 administrators
… working for free, with no central control
Wikimedia’s scope286 languages
18 projects
images, data, dictionary, travel guide, species, quotes, books, source material, wiki software...
Wikimedia FoundationSan Francisco
150 employees
Donor funded
Nonprofit
No ads!
Wikipedia’s pillarsNeutral point of view
Verifiability
Consensus
Civility
Open copyright
Wikipedia’s reliabilityAs accurate as Britannica
Errors fixed quickly over time
“Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow”
Virtual filter
Teaches information literacy
1. Edit Filter automatically rejects known vandalism patterns
2. ClueBot reverts and flags suspicious edits with a machine-learning bot
3. Humans review malicious changes tagged with language recognition tools
4. Vandalism patterns are checked against metadata and historical trends
5. Recent changes patrollers scroll through new edits
6. Editors alerted to each change on all pages in their article watchlist
7. Specialists and experts report and fix mistakes when they see them
8. Millions of readers identify and correct errors when they come upon them
9. Link blacklists lock out known spam sites and unreliable sources
10. Detection mechanisms to determine conflict of interest
11. Administrators to block disruptive editors and protect pages
Multiple safeguards
Featured, Good articles
Semi-formal peer review
Total: 4,000 FAs and 10,000 GAs
Frequently written by experts
Primarily by one or by a few people
[20]
Pedagogical Benefit● Engaged students, global audience, realworld purpose
● Unique assignment, peer feedback, cool and different
● Media literacy, identify bias, evaluate credibility
● Constructing knowledge, content gaps
● Discourse, collaboration, community of practice
● Expository writing, literature review, citation
● Critical thinking, process reflection
● Plagiarism, close paraphrasing, copyright
● Digital citizenship, online etiquette, wiki code
Plagiarism
Education ProgramStarted with 2010 Public Policy Initiative
20,000 printed pages
6,000 Wikipedia articles
Mission Alignment:
Increasing participation
Increasing quality
