So, I have to be a blogger now, and this is where I begin! Yesterday I was in a workshop on Powerful learning with open resources – how to develop Wikipedia assignments. First and foremost, where does the word wiki come from? According to this article, “wiki” is “quick” in Hawaiian, so as the meaning of wiki pages in finding information. In my opinion, Wikipedia is more popular as a source for retrieving first-hand information. One of the participants in yesterday’s workshop mentioned: “first-year Bachelors students cite Wikipedia, and the final year students cite the sources of wiki pages”. But, does the academic community value or use Wikipedia as a legitimate source for their scholarly articles? The educator’s “love-hate relationship” with one of the largest information corpus is quite interesting to investigate.
The statistics of Wikipedia is amazing; want to see yourself? Visit https://stats.wikimedia.org/. As an example, the 3M+ Swedish wiki pages which are a collection of efforts of about 800 contributors are being accessed by over 80 million times on average per month. The question then is, who contributes to high page view statistics. The biggest information corpus is popular among school children, as well as students in higher education, as their “tertiary source” of information. For example, Altanopoulou and Tselios view wiki as a technology and discusses the factors influencing the intentions of undergraduate students on accepting it. Perceived ease of use and attitudes towards use being significant factors justify the general public opinion on Wikipedia. Neil Selwyn and Stephen Girard prove their claim “Wikipedia is now an embedded feature of most students’ study” using a case from Australia. The story of Wikipedia is fascinating not only that the majority of information seekers rely on it, but also many writers (presumably prospective writers) volunteer their spare time on making the corpus grow constantly. This, hence, has become the most realistic living example of a citizen science approach being successful.
I learnt my lesson, Wikipedia is great; and checked the wiki page for the term on the tip of my tongue these days “Learning Analytics“. Seems I need to be a wiki contributor soon. Then “A random article” on the left menu landed on “Dnieper Upland“, which says “This article about a location in Ukraine is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” at the end. Hmm… maybe its just my bad luck…
The Wikimedia Foundation is working hard to get more academics to contribute to Wikipedia and to ensure its accuracy. Many academics are still skeptical but the answer is that if you see an inaccuracy, go in and improve it! Try yourself but I warn you that if you try to edit without having external links to sound evidence for your claim your post will be very quickly deleted! It’s actually not as easy as some people think to edit Wikipedia.
Thank you, Alastair, for the comment! Yes, I agree… Not many people are motivated to contribute. Yes. the contents need to be very resourceful and connected to relevant sources.