The wiki way to work: using wikibooks in your classroom



The Wiki Way To Work: Using Wikipedia In Your Classroom.

Wikipedia is the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia with well over a 1.5 million entries. As we’ve seen in Doug Johnson’s article: Wikipedia Ban it or Boost it? This collaboratively written online encyclopedia is a valuable resource, especially if you understand the Wiki process and keep an open (if somewhat skeptical) mindset.

This is also the right frame of mind for using Wikipedia in your school setting. The web is a wonderful place to find lesson plans. While many lesson plans reference Wikipedia as a source, not many focus directly on how participate in the writing environment provided by the world’s widest Wiki. No surprisingly the best source of advice on how to use Wikipedia in the classroom comes from Wikipedia itself. Here’s a quick introduction using Wikipedia in your classroom:

School and university projects:

This extensive article provides a template for success. It will certainly give you a structured starting place as you begin to wrap your ideas around the wiki way of work.

Wikipedia’s instructor orientation will help you plan your strategy and lessons. Wikipedia provides you with an overview, list of suggested activities, and a list of current projects using Wikipedia as part of their curriculum. Although the projects are mainly being run by universities, this work can also be adapted for middle and high school projects.

Overview / Guidelines: 10 common sense steps to running your wikipedia project.

Be sure to read all of the guidelines and follow up with “"No original research" and "What Wikipedia is not".

Educational Template: School and university projects/ educational boilerplate:

This template page provides you with an introduction, exercises for students, and a follow up paper. By customizing this form and publishing it on your website you have the start of a well organized lesson that takes advantage of Wikipedia’s collaborative editing features..

Suggested Exercises



There are plenty of housekeeping tasks that students can do as they build the skill set to become Wiki editors. Or consider having bilingual students translate an article from their native language into English. Wikipedia’s program to combat systematic bias provides opportunities to those interested in filling gaps and dealing with omissions in the entries. Wikipedia also needs volunteers to provide research citations to back up existing articles. For citation guidelines see:

Also valuable is the School and University Pprojects - Instructions for Sstudents

These instructions for students provide both an Editing FAQ and Contributing FAQ .

In addition to instructions on how to write new articles, students are encouaged to expand and revise ‘stubs’ which are short partial entries that need revision. Finally, students will find links to help which offer detailed explanations on many topics. Users can also set up talk pages, which provide an personalized webpage dedicated to all topics wiki.

Not everyone will be willing to jump right into the complexities of Wiki Editing. If you’d like to start by building the critical mindset needed to work with community generated information consider using this lesson plan offered by the New York Times Learning Network.: Learning to Think Like Fact Checkers

This excellent plan focuses on distinguishing fact vs opinion and applies the lesson along with a cautionary tale of what happens when Wikipedia goes wrong. The companion article for this plan, Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar by Katharine Q. Seelye

This would be a great way to introduce a Wikipedia editing project. You and your students would learn the Wiki process while thinking critically about how to create the best possible Wiki product!

Wikibooks is an initiative to create collaboratively written online textbooks. Currently there are 22,936 book modules in over 1000 books available free from the Wikibooks project. .

Of particular interest is Wikipedia in the Classroom and Beyond, this is the beginning of an onlne text designed to help us all see how we can use the power of wikis and the remarkable resource of Wikipedia in our professional practice. The current introduction (which can be editied by anyone joins and becomes an editor) reads:

“This Wikibook, subtitled The Student and Instructor's Guide of Questions and Lesson Plans to Wikipedia Encyclopedia, is an evolving supplementary guide to assist students and instructors of all types to utilize Wikipedia as a learning tool.”

This is a truly Evolving resource, in fact it’s just getting off the ground. Those interested can actively discuss and contribute their ideas. Hopefull this will spark others interested in the topic to contribute and so it grows.. a collaborative text on how to use wikis in the classroom. To become a Wikibooks editor you simply establish an account and verify your emai. You then contribute subject to these frank and emphatic guidelines:

“Please note that all contributions to Wikibooks are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (see Wikibooks:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!”

So how would you use this resource in your classroom? As an online teacher of teachers at UW-Stout, my first thought is to ask my students to use a wiki to brainstorm and write lesson plans about how they might use Wikipedia with that could them be submitted to Wikipedia in the Classroom and Beyond,

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