For those interested in working with the assignment described in Part 2 or adapting a similar project for their own purposes, we have shared below the teaching materials developed for this assignment.
If instructors would like to see an example of this assignment embedded in a larger course, you can consult DiCaglio's Spring 2022 Technical and Professional Editing syllabus.
We'd love to hear about your use of the assignment materials! Although we cannot offer extensive support, we are interested in the long-term sustainability of these materials. Be in touch with Joshua DiCaglio about your own projects or if updates are needed to any of the documents (although you're welcome to copy them into your own documents if you'd like to make modifications).
This assignment still makes use of the Wiki Education Dashboard, primarily for the support offered through that program for interfacing with Wikipedia itself. However, as discussed in the Introduction, the Dashboard is not ideal for this assignment since, at least in its current form, its training and resources are largely geared towards other kinds of contributions to Wikipedia. Part of the issue is that Wiki Education needs to support many types of assignments at many different levels, which means that they understandably do not have in place the guidance required for this assignment (this is one reason we have worked to make them available here).
In the final form described in this webtext, this assignment uses the WikiEducation Dashboard to
- help students set up Wikipedia accounts,
- provide a basic database of training in basic Wikipedia editing, which these advanced students are expected to work through on their own as they begin working,
- register usernames in relation to real names (the Dashboard enables students to remain anonymous by only associating their usernames with their real names within the Dashboard),
- select and assign articles, and
- officially register the assignment with the Wiki Education foundation, which is essential in the event that any support is needed. Doing so also helps the organization keep tabs on assignments, which helps support all teaching with Wikipedia.
We thus encourage anyone teaching this assignment to visit the Wiki Education Dashboard website to register their assignment. Spots are limited, and calls for new assignments are usually put out a few months ahead of any semester.
Instructors might use it more extensively to run this assignment with appropriate modifications, with the caveat that, in our experience, the focus on production within the interface can distract some students from the editing tasks highlighted here. Instructors looking to do so might use the material used by DiCaglio in 2020 as a starting place.
In preparation for this article and in the process of teaching this assignment, we have prepared a range of teaching materials geared towards students. These documents are in this ZIP file.
All documents are released to the public domain in association with this publication using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Instructors are welcome to adapt this material for their purposes.
Here is the full list of direct links to the Google documents.
Core Assignment Documents
Major Issues and Policies
Guidelines Geared Towards Specific Kinds of Articles and Situations
Joshua DiCaglio has implemented this assignment into a Canvas module which includes the documents as embedded files and links out to the Wiki Education dashboard. This was then refined by Jessie Cortez in Spring 2023 and uploaded to Canvas Commons. This Canvas shell is in a M/W/F format. An alternative Canvas shell, with a T/Th schedule, was developed by Gwendolyn Inocencio and can be found at this link. (Link: https://lor.instructure.com/resources/f525782ad03946269d3ad0f9e601721f?shared). If your institution uses Canvas, you're welcome to use and adapt these materials for your use. Note that we've included grammar days in the modules. These are meant to be light days to cover some copyediting while students are working on the developmental editing tasks on Wikipedia.
Our assessment for the Wikipedia project is geared towards the tasks specified in Part 2. Below is the rubric we work from.
| Criteria |
Full Credit Description |
| Reflection and Procedures
(15 points) |
The summary of the project is thorough and thoughtful, with sufficient description of the work done, a substantial appraisal of the challenges faced and how they attempted to address them, and a careful reflection on what they have learned from working with Wikipedia. |
| Community Engagement
(15 points) |
Evidence of appropriate engagement with the Wikipedia community. Talk page posts are thoughtful and written in a way that fits the situation. Edit summaries contain the appropriate level of detail. Editing makes way for other editors, both present and future. Any communication is followed up on and any conflicts resolved diplomatically. |
| Improvement
(Article A and B, 30 points each) |
There is clear and substantial evidence of a significant intervention in the writing trajectory of the article, whether implemented or made available in other means via sandboxes, talk page posts, or other forms of communication. These changes could include significant changes to organization, refocusing of content, reworking or rewriting of sections for particular issues (NPOV, tone, OR), content moved from or to another article, and any other changes as appropriate. These changes are thoughtfully implemented and appropriate for the article.
If changes are not implemented, clear and legitimate reasons are given. Where major issues are not resolved, they are at least noted. |
| Finish
(Article A and B, 5 points each) |
The article has been left in a state that integrates their work into current and future work on the article. This may include clearly explaining remaining issues, resolving or adding tags as appropriate, updating existing conversations, and fixing any obvious formatting issues introduced from the intervention. |