Wikipedia as an academic service-learning tool in science and technology: higher education case from Siberia

Wikipedia, the open crowdsourced encyclopedia that anyone can edit, ranks among the top ten most-visited websites globally. Its integration into university curriculum as an innovative educational tool is a slowly growing trend; however, many higher education institutions have yet to fully grasp its potential. In response, a specific optional module for Wikipedia editing, designed for the selected undergraduate science courses at the School of Advanced Studies, Russia, was implemented as an optional extra credit service-learning activity, a teaching methodology combining meaningful service to the community with curriculum-based learning. Students who chose to participate and those who preferred not to participate in the activity were invited to participate in a research project to explore their perspectives and experiences. In total, five sessions of focus group discussions were conducted with participants (12 females and 2 males) in one set and non-participants (5 females and 4 males) in another to identify students' perspectives on themes such as their interest in science, reasons for their choices, and their expectations before the activity while post-experience focus group discussions were used to identify the perspectives of participant students on themes, encompassing contribution of the service-learning activity, acquisition of new skills, and the development of prosocial behaviors. Students' opinions on integrating social responsibility topics into the curriculum were also explored. The results extracted from these focus group discussions, analyzed through consensual coding, revealed factors promoting student participation, like interest in the subject, novelty of the activity, and grade improvement opportunities, as well as factors deterring participation, such as concerns about academic benefits, workload, and time constraints. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that Wikipedia editing serves as a novel teaching methodology, promoting student learning and development in digital literacy and information literacy, which are among the twenty-first-century skills. Interestingly, at the same time, not all students could address the value of contributing to open, crowdsourced knowledge for public service or interpret this activity as an academic service-learning. These suggest that Wikipedia editing is an innovative teaching approach, fostering students' learning and development while also indicating its potential to enhance students' understanding of responsible citizenship and public service in the digital age.

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article's text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields-coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

Library instruction and Wikipedia: investigating students' perceived information literacy, lifelong learning, and social responsibility through Wikipedia editing

Objectives:

This article presents a multiyear pilot study delineating practical challenges, solutions, and lessons learned from Wikipedia editing experiences with first-year medical students at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The purpose of our project was to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of Wikipedia editing to improve information literacy and lifelong learning skills and to investigate aspects of social responsibility in first-year medical students.

Methods:

Lessons were provided through a combination of in-person and online instruction via the WikiEdu learning management system (LMS). Students next selected a health-related Wikipedia article to edit. After the editing experience, structural completeness data were collected from the WikiEdu LMS. Feedback was collected via an anonymous retrospective pre-post survey to assess the students' attitudes toward their perceived information literacy skills and the social responsibility of improving Wikipedia articles. Nonparametric tests were conducted to compare pre versus post outcomes.

Results:

Fifty-seven (79%) participants in the 2018 cohort and forty-nine (64%) participants in the 2019 cohort completed the retrospective pre-post survey. In both cohorts, respondents showed statistically significant increases (p<.05) in self-rating of all ten domains of information literacy and social responsibility after completing the program.

Conclusions:

This study showed that medical students are competent editors of Wikipedia and that their contributions improve both the quality of the articles and their own perceived information literacy. Additionally, editing medicine-related articles provides an opportunity to build students' social responsibility by improving content on an open platform that reaches millions each day.

A Clockwork Wikipedia: From a Broad Perspective to a Case Study

While research has shown that scientists use Wikipedia and that scientific content on Wikipedia ramifies back into scientific literature, many questions remain on how the two sides interact and through what paradigm this dynamic may be best understood. Using the circadian clock field as a case study, we discuss this scientific field's representation on Wikipedia. We traced the changes made to the articles for "Circadian clock" and "Circadian rhythm" and reviewed the debates that informed them over a span of a decade, using Wikipedia's native and third-party tools. Specifically, we focused on how groundbreaking research pertaining to the function of biological oscillators was integrated into the articles to reflect a wider paradigmatic shift within the field. We also identified the articles' main editors to detail the dynamic collective editorial process that took place during a time that saw the field undergo a fundamental change. We discuss the different concerns the academic community has with Wikipedia-specifically regarding its content and its contributors-to ask whether the online encyclopedia's open model is inherently at odds with scientific culture or whether the model could reflect science or even expand on its core values and practices such as peer review and the idea of communicating science.

Giving Psychology Away: Implementation of Wikipedia Editing in an Introductory Human Development Course

To test the feasibility of Wikipedia editing in large undergraduate psychology classrooms, we engaged groups of students in a large introductory-level Human Development course ( N = 110) in editing Wikipedia articles to improve psychology-related content. Students attended in-class workshops and received online support to develop skills. They demonstrated considerable engagement with the assignment, averaging 14.5 posts to Wikipedia over a span of 50 days. Most connected Wikipedia editing with other course materials and reported benefits of peer-evaluating classmates’ work. Most reported beneficial interactions with Wikipedians in the public domain, who flagged and/or reverted edits of dubious quality, while correcting errors. Students demonstrated improvements in information literacy and Wikipedia knowledge, with gains in locating and evaluating the quality of source materials.