Wikipedia as editorial microcosm

A Summary of the Scholarly Context

As is already clear in the previous sections, the first three problems have generated not only popular attention but also academic studies and course assignments, particularly at the university level. Studies have been conducted on the accuracy of Wikipedia,^[11] the dynamics of its community,^[12] and its systemic bias.^[13] Fewer studies have been conducted on the more traditional editing problems manifest in Wikipedia, perhaps because the early rhetoric of Wikipedia positioned it as an exceptional writing space, which may have overshadowed the ways that evenly distributed and less centrally regulated writing spaces require such work. Thus, scholarship in writing studies and digital rhetoric tends to lean toward a discussion of these other problems.^[14] We would like to situate the work here in relation to this existing work, while adding that Wikipedia is one excellent case study of how difficult writing tasks, while greatly transformed by new technologies, remain as relevant as ever.

The Pedagogical Context

Assignments and occasionally whole courses have been designed using Wikipedia, with early assignments being discussed in publications around 2007 (although they certainly existed earlier, as we can see on a 2003 version of Wikipedia's School and University Projects page), and a noticeable increase in assignments about a decade into Wikipedia's development, in large part due to the creation of a formal program in 2010.^[15] This program, the Wiki Education Foundation, was created to work with instructors, support their students, provide trainings, and, eventually, an education dashboard that integrated with Wikipedia itself.

In Search of an Advanced Editing Project

This webtext grew out of an assignment designed by Joshua DiCaglio in spring 2017 at Texas A&M, with the explicit intention of using the complexities of Wikipedia editing and community to teach students about the dynamics and procedures for advanced developmental editing. Over the course of 6 years, he taught the course each spring, revising and refining the project to focus more explicitly on stalled articles.

The impetus for this webtext arises from the gradual realization that this assignment was both more unique and important than DiCaglio initially realized. After several iterations, it became clear that the idea of stalled articles needed to be outlined more clearly, given that the primary attention of researchers and Wikipedians was occupied greatly with these other three major issues. While it was clear that plenty of contributors have always understood that bold editing is needed and that editing is a difficult task, it also became clear in running this assignment that emphasis is often placed elsewhere. In many instances, this assignment has been met with some confusion. (Only a small part of this confusion arises because editing and being an editor on Wikipedia refers to any contributions, which makes it somewhat difficult to isolate for Wikipedians the editing we are aiming to contribute.)

This emphasis on problems one through three is most noticeable in the Wiki Education's teaching materials and Dashboard interface, which was used more extensively in 2018–2020 before DiCaglio began developing the auxiliary materials described here. The Wiki Education materials are built primarily for learning outcomes related to writing and research, which therefore puts an emphasis on adding content, articles, and citations, even if most students are working on existing articles. Thus, as of 2022, the Dashboard's trainings, metrics, and assessment tools are primarily designed around content production.

In contrast, this assignment was built around students intervening in existing articles, de-emphasizing production and emphasizing intervention. The learning outcomes are different, emphasizing entering a community of writers, thinking about the whole history (past writing, other current writers, and potential future contributors), and making strategic interventions that were explicitly not about centering oneself as the writer. The tasks are different, focusing on learning to understand and engage in the community, examining the policies in the context of difficult examples, thinking about creative ways to push articles forward, and being willing to accept incompleteness given the nature of Wikipedia's communal and ongoing editing process. And, of course, the products are different, with a focus on the process and community engagement as much as where the page was left at the end of the assignment. Successful assignments included articles being deleted, content being removed, conversations being started but not resolved, new sections created without substantial content with the explicit purpose of guiding future editing contributions, and significant reorganization of existing content that nonetheless left the article in an apparently rougher state than before. We have thus found it useful to formulate the aims, challenges, and outcomes of this assignment at length in Part 2, as well as develop extensive assignment documents that assist students in working through this assignment.

As we have become more familiar with the broader Wikipedia and education community, it became clear that this assignment provides a unique advanced-level contribution to a broad-based curriculum using Wikipedia. This project is thus designed to fit both within writing studies and education, while also providing an extensive analysis of stalled articles that can be of use for Wikipedians.

^[11] Studies on the accuracy of Wikipedia have explored the issue in a variety of topics and fields, for example in health (London et al., 2019; Temple & Fraser, 2014), in history (Holman Rector, 2008), and in political science (Brown, 2011).

^[12] The dynamics of community are one of the most interesting aspects of Wikipedia, which we have only covered briefly in the introduction in Problem #2. These issues have been covered with some thoroughness in recent scholarship. For a shorter overview of the community, refer to McDowell and Vetter (2020). For more extensive but older accounts, refer to O'Sullivan (2009) and Jemielniak (2014).

^[13] Some studies on the question of systemic bias and access on Wikipedia include Lockett (2019), Koziura et al. (2020), Ford and Wajcman (2017), Menking and Erickson (2015), and Menking and Rosenberg (2021).

^[14] In the field of teaching first-year composition and writing studies, refer to Cummings's (2009) foundational work Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia. Refer also to Vetter et al. (2019).

^[15] For a partial history, refer to Davis (2018).