New Tools for Using Wikipedia Writing Assignments


Tools for Using Wikipedia in the Classroom

  1. Find relevant articles: You can easily find relevant Wikipedia articles that require work. You can browse articles by area of interest such as “social psychology” or search by keyword and get a list of relevant articles along with information about the quality, importance, number of views, and length. While browsing the articles, you can assign a particular article for your students in any of your classes to work on.
  2. Help pages: Simple tutorials are available to help you and your students become more familiar with the Wikipedia interface, understand how Wikipedia works and how to contribute to Wikipedia.
  3. Wikipedia assignment wizard: This tool provides step-by-step procedures to build a custom course page for your class to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into the syllabus.
  4. Feedback tool: An easy way to review the work of your students and provide them with feedback. This tool will enable you to view a list of your students and see the work they have done (e.g. total number of words edited and time spent editing).  Additionally, you can see all the changes made to an article and have easy ways to comment on their work, either privately or on the article’s discussion page.
  5. Access to discussions and feedback from other faculty who are using Wikipedia in their classes: The application provides a discussion forum in which you can post your questions and concerns and view stories about experiences of others.  Wikipedia experts will monitor the discussion forum and respond to your questions as quickly as possible.
  6. Support for students’ peer review process: This tool provides rubrics for the peer-review process and an easy way for you to assign peer-reviews to your students in the class. You can also view reviews submitted and provide a forum for students to comment on each others’ work.
  7. Support for students’ group work: This tool allows students to choose a group-mate among their classmates and provides information about group of students working together to the instructor.
  8. Suggested Timeline: The application provides a suggested timeline of how to organize Wikipedia assignment in classroom based on experience of previous instructors.
  9. Student Activity: Students will be able to see what others are doing.