Cmckittr

I am part of a course taught by Wiki Education that trains scholars in how to edit Wikipedia. Learn more at wikiedu.org. All of my contributions are my own and I take responsibility for them.

Cmckittr (talk) 17:05, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Advice from someone who's done this?

Hi, I am teaching a course on endocrinology and my students are editing Wikipedia using the Wiki Education platform this fall. I found your course page after one of my students decided to work on the Behavioral endocrinology article that some of your students worked on. I'm reaching out to see if you have any advice for someone doing this for the first time in a similar course. Any suggestions of things that went well or things you would change if you did it again would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! UWM.AP.Endo (talk) 20:42, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Endocrinology wiki

Best of luck to you with the Wikipedia project for your behavioral endocrinology course. I would say the biggest challenge my students found was identifying a topic that they wanted to edit/improve, especially since they needed to pick the topics fairly early in the semester before they really know what all is out there. The inability to use primary sources tended to be quite frustrating, especially if they were working on something that was relatively new (e.g. one of my students did a page on "Cute Aggression". Not much out there research-wise and no real reviews, although the NY Times publishers a story about it after the student had selected the topic). Another student wanted to add some historical background to her selected page, but her historical sources were rejected for being to old (which was sort of the point).

Some students found the Wiki platform tricky to use, and often lost work if they forgot to save it regularly (many opted to do their writing in Word and then paste the text into Wikipedia later). As part of the project, I had students keep a weekly blog about their experiences (created as a Wiki on Moodle, our course management platform)--in the blog they posted about their progress on the project, but also about how they were feeling about it as the semester progressed. Similarly, their final oral presentation to the class was half reflection on the process ("I tried this, but it didn't work..."; "started with this topic but couldn't find enough/found too much", etc.) and half presentation of the final product highlighting where their page had begun and what they had done to improve it. The students really appreciated the blog and the opportunity to discuss their experiences, rather than focusing exclusively on the final product.

The most difficult thing for me was evaluating the process and product, especially when the pages changed over time. I ultimately had them create multiple sandboxes: one with a draft that was used for evaluation by both me and a peer evaluator (and was not changed after a certain date), and one with a final version that responded to the comments on the draft and would become the one that was published. The peer review process I used was pretty clunky, and I'll have to refine that in the future. I had a couple of international students for whom English was not their first language, and that is clear in some of the final products; quality of content contributed was also quite variable (as you no doubt see if you are on the Behavioral Endocrinology page).

Many students felt that the amount of effort put into the research, etc. was not adequately reflected in what they ultimately published (although I could see that pretty clearly). Some of my peers have used the Wiki assignment in conjunction with a traditional paper but I used it alone--the students had mixed feeling about that. Some found it more difficult than a "regular" paper, and most found it more frustrating, more challenging and more fun.

If you would like to talk to me about this outside of the User talk area, you can reach me @drew.edu using my Wiki user name. Cmckittr (talk) 17:33, 27 September 2019 (UTC)cmckittr