Part 2: Teaching

Intervening in the Microcosm: Teaching to Address Stalled Articles

The stalled articles discussed in Part 1 are not only intellectually interesting but also powerful microcosms for teaching about applied editing. They provide the opportunity to edit existing content in a way that

  • teaches students the need to adjust editing recommendations to a given organization's convention;
  • coordinates amongst many writers, contributors, and interested parties (whether past, present, or future; actual or potential); and
  • handles the complexities that come in facilitating good writing rather than being the primary producer of content.
The bold interventions required to address stalled articles is productively intimidating, helping students work through the trepidation that often comes from editing another person's work, and giving them a chance to learn to be more diplomatic in their communication and comprehensive in their view of writing.

This section describes and provides materials for an assignment using Stalled Articles to teach developmental editing within an advanced writing or editing course. We provide the following materials:

As a service learning assignment geared towards a nonprofit aligned with a (more or less) public good, intervention in stalled articles provides many of the advantages one would have working with an actual company or client while avoiding the problematic free labor and uneven responses that often come with such assignments.

If desired, instructors can also have students edit in Wikimarkup to practice editing in a backend environment similar to HTML.

Such assignments are also of great benefit to Wikipedia. We acknowledge that the problems and tasks outlined in Part 1 require a great deal of time, effort, and skill to address; while some devoted Wikipedians certainly have those skills and do take the time to work articles up to this level, pedagogical efforts provide a unique situation in which sustained editorial intervention can be taught and rewarded. As with any teaching with Wikipedia, some student work will often be insufficient (or even harmful), but our experience is that a majority of students can and do step up and provide helpful interventions, and even those who do not successfully intervene learn a lot from the process without harmful effects to the trajectory of an article.

This assignment has been run successfully eight times in a technical and professional editing course at a large public state school in Texas. Each time the students have surprised us with their ability to handle the issues involved. At the same time, we again acknowledge that these students were advanced undergraduate students, mostly English majors or students within a technical writing minor. Thus, while we hope other instructors at other levels of education might find the material here useful, we see the assignment described here as the upper end of a broad-based curriculum about and using Wikipedia for pedagogical purposes.

Ultimately, we hope the materials here lower the barriers to entry for running assignments of this sort. There is a rather steep learning curve, but our experience is that a certain degree of adventurousness (much like the bold editing we're asking of our students) will reward instructors with a deep understanding of Wikipedia within one or two iterations of the assignment—at which point it becomes much easier and intellectually rewarding.

In turn, we hope that more assignments built around stalled articles will direct more attention to these developmental issues within Wikipedia and assist in addressing them. While the time limits of the classroom often prevent students from continuing to follow up on their work, the hope is that a well crafted assignment will provide substantive and helpful interventions that work in tandem with the efforts of Wikipedians, particularly if instructors take the time to follow up on the articles and ensure they are in a good place—a task that we have found is easy enough to accomplish in the grading process.

When we reexamined the status of these articles after the sixth iteration, we did not notice a single case in which student work had proved harmful in the long run; at worst, edits were undone, interventions fell flat, or conversations were left unfinished. But given the timeline and continual process of Wikipedia writing and the reality that community editors are often intermittent in their contributions, we would suggest that such loose ends are worth it for the significant interventions accomplished. Given that students addressing stalled articles also learn the conventions of Wikipedia, some of the students may also continue to contribute in the future or even follow up themselves.