purposes, such as integrating course content into tangible real-world actions, improving students’ writing skills, engaging in digital and information literacy skills, and creating projects in which students felt invested. As Davidson summarizes, assignments like these are “the ideal way to empower the next generation to use the avalanche of information at their fingertips in a purposive, responsive way to make possible their own future success and, ideally, their contribution to a better society” (2017, p. 97). At the end of the course, most students commented on feeling “proud” of their contributions: “After all of the time I put into this project I have to say that it is one of things I am most proud of doing here at school. I visited and worked on Wikipedia every week for the entirety of the semester, which really made this assignment mean a lot.”
In The New Education, Cathy Davidson (2017) reviews the Stanford Study of Writing led by Andrea Lunsford, which found that students in the early 2000s felt more invested in writing that had an audience beyond their professor and classmates (pp. 94–95). Wikipedia can provide such an experience; as one student reflected, “Over one million Wikipedians viewed our pages! In just a few months our entire class made an impact. . . . Wikipedia is a true gem as its free information that would otherwise be hidden behind paywalls or for select individuals.” In their final reflection papers, regardless of the negative feelings they had around the project at times, nearly all students said the project was unlike anything they have ever done before. In one student’s words, “The process of actually editing a live Wikipedia page is not only educational, but gratifying. To be able to pull open Wikipedia and tell your family and friends, ‘Yeah, I wrote that!’ is a really rewarding and satisfying feeling.”
References
Abbate, J. (2012). Recoding gender: Women’s changing participation in computing. MIT Press.
Adams, J., Brückner, H., & Naslund, C. (2019). Who counts as a notable sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, race, and the “professor test”. Socius 5, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118823946.
