Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment

Abstract

Wikipedia is an open educational resource that connects writers and editors to diverse discourse communities around the world. Unwarranted stigma is attached to the use of Wikipedia in higher education due to fears that students will not pursue rigorous research practices because of the easy access to information that Wikipedia facilitates. In studies referred to in this paper, undergraduate writing students are taught about the need to interrogate any information they find on Wikipedia just as they would other online source material. They are inducted into fact checking, editing and creating Wikipedia articles as a means to analyse source material critically and to advance their research, writing and digital literacy. Meanwhile, in a postgraduate course in magazine studies, instead of writing essays, students are promoting Australian magazines and print culture by writing Wikipedia entries about Antipodean magazines and their editors. These courses experiment with new approaches to formative and summative assessment; promote group research, collaborative and participatory writing, writing across networks and negotiating discourse communities; and challenge students’ perceptions about peer review and the legitimacy of Wikipedia.

Keywords:

• group assessment
• formative assessment
• Wikipedia
• magazines
• writing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our students for being such generous participants in our research. We would also like to acknowledge Megan Le Masurier, Rosemary Williamson, Lili Pâquet, Richard Ames, Robert Cummings, Steven King and Gayatri Kotnala. The University of Sydney’s School of Letters Art and Media Research Support Scheme supported this work.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1127322.