Wikipedia in the library - the elephant in the (reading) room? discusses Wikipedia and its use in libraries and education. It notes that Wikipedia has over 30 million articles in 280 languages created through collaborative writing. While quality varies, studies have found Wikipedia to be mostly accurate. The document advocates for teaching students to engage critically with Wikipedia to evaluate sources and information. It outlines several university programs that have students write and edit Wikipedia articles or use it as a teaching tool to develop research skills.

1. Wikipedia in the library - the
elephant in the (reading) room?
Nancy Graham, University of Roehampton
Andrew Gray, British Antarctic Survey

2. the project
• A collaboratively-written encyclopedia
• A synthesis of published material
• Aiming for neutrality and verifiability
...not editorial authority
• Free to use, distribute and reuse

3. the numbers
• Thirteen years old
• 30,000,000 articles in 280 languages
• Growing by 8-10,000 new articles/day
• Reaching 500,000,000 readers/month
...or 7% of the world’s population

4. the problem
“We have a problem. The kids these days
are reading too many encyclopedias.”

5. the opportunity
• Users are actively seeking out the resource
• “Don’t do that!” is never very effective
• This is a perfect teaching moment
– how to tell the good from the bad?
– thinking critically about online material
– engaging with the means of production
– what are we actually saying “don’t” to?

6. mapping to ANCIL
http://ccfil.pbworks.com/f/ANCIL_final.pdf
ANCIL Strand Example learning outcomes from
ANCIL
Wikipedia related activities
1 – Transition from school
to HE
Assess your current info-seeking behaviour and
compare to experts in your discipline
Using a Wikipedia article on your topic, use
the references to identify familiar and
unfamiliar sources.
3 – Developing academic
literacies
Identify appropriate terminology, use of language
and academic idiom in your discipline
Assess and compare the quality of 3 short
Wikipedia articles (one poorly written)
4 – Mapping and evaluating
the information landscape
Develop evaluative criteria for recognizing and
selecting trustworthy sources of academic quality
in your discipline
Compare a Wikipedia page with a traditional
encyclopaedia. Compare with excerpts from
textbooks and journals.
7 – Ethical dimension of
information
Summarise the key ways you can use and share
information without infringing another’s rights
Students asked to find suitable images for re-
use using Wikimedia Commons.
8 – Presenting and
communicating knowledge
Use language appropriately in your academic
writing
Discuss the importance of writing objectively
in Wikipedia
9 – Synthesising information
and creating new
knowledge
Assess the value of new information objectively in
the context of your work
Students to debate a topic using information
from Wikipedia
10 – Social dimension of
information
Transfer the skills of finding, critically evaluating
and deploying information to the workplace
Ask students to use only freely available
sources from Wikipedia to answer a subject
query, then search using subscription
sources.

7. some thoughts
• On average... quality is acceptable
• 2005 study: four errors in WP for three in Britannica
• 2011 study (in English, Spanish, Arabic):
“…the Wikipedia articles in this sample scored higher overall
than the comparison articles with respect to accuracy,
references, style/ readability and overall judgment…”
• But millions of articles = millions of problems
• Radically transparent editorial process
• Signs are there for alert readers

8. looking for the hints
Article tags
Talk pages and histories
Corner icons
- locked (a red flag) - quality ratings (positive)
...and, most basic of all, style

9. moving onwards
Footnotes
Internal navigation

10. the projects
• Wikipedia Education Program
– Encouraging teachers to engage with WP
– Content creation, critical assessment, etc.
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal
• Online courses
– “Writing Wikipedia” MOOC (now fourth round)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WIKISOO
• Outreach resources
– Wide range of past projects for different audiences
– Some printed/printable material available
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf

11. 11http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Evaluating_Wikipedia_article_quality_(Bookshelf)

12. case studies
• Head & Eisenberg (2010): survey of the ways students use
Wikipedia as a resource
• Sormuen & Lehtiö (2011): students wrote Wikipedia articles,
which were examined to study their citing/plagarising habits
• Konieczny (2012): survey of five years of teaching using
Wikipedia in various ways
• Roth, Davis & Carver (2013): examination of student
engagement with Wikipedia-related teaching projects
...and many other examples of university projects

13. 13

14. Contact details
Nancy Graham, University of Roehampton
Email: nancy.graham@roehampton.ac.uk
Twitter: @msnancygraham
Andrew Gray, British Antarctic Survey
Email: anday@bas.ac.uk
Twitter: @generalising
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