Teaching with Wikipedia in a 21^st‐century classroom: Perceptions of Wikipedia and its educational benefits

Abstract

This paper explores the current perception of Wikipedia in academia, focusing on both the reasons for its unpopularity among some, and the reasons for its growing acceptance among others. First, the reasons that Wikipedia is still struggling to gain acceptance among many academics and higher education professionals are identified. These include common misconceptions about Wikipedia, doubts about its quality; uneasiness with the challenge it poses to the traditional peer review system; and a lack of careerenhancing motivations related to using Wikipedia. Second, the benefits of teaching with Wikipedia for educators, students and the wider society, as discussed in the current teaching literature, are explored.Finally, the paper presents an argument for using Wikipedia in a variety of ways to help students develop critical and academic writing skills.

When the World Helps Teach Your Class: Using Wikipedia to Teach Controversial Issues

“…Although academics view Wikipedia with skepticism, a growing scholarly literature illustrates the pedagogical value of publishing assignments (Kennedy et al 2015;Konieczny 2016).…”

“…As Konieczny (2012) noted, "[t]he Wikipedia assignment…has a potential to be more enjoyable than most other traditional assignments, and some studies of student motivations report high student assessments." The motivation derives from the fact that students see their writing having a visible impact on the world (Konieczny 2016(Konieczny , 1528.…”

“…They stated that they were shocked by the comments and reviews of editors and peers. One way to address the lack of familiarity with Wikipedia standards is to involve students in a community-review project (Konieczny 2012). Wikipedia has several, including the following:…”

Wikipedia as Informal Self-Education for Clinical Decision-Making in Medical Practice

“…Meanwhile, there is evidence that attitudes in academia towards Wikipedia are changing, where as Konieczny puts it, "Wikipedia has become one of the most often consulted reference works, used by nearly all students as well as most academics and educators" [20] while Soules shows how, over five years in four universities of the California State University System, there has been a move across all levels of faculty to a more favourable attitude towards Wikipedia. [21] Information technology and healthcare education…”

Wikipedia access and contribution: Language choice in multilingual communities . A case study

“…Their report is part of a wider research effort, which aims at accounting for the benefits of these activities as a way of fostering both collaboration and the development of media literacy skills among students, while participating in the open culture of the project Brailas et al, 2015;Ricuarte-Quijano and Álvarez, 2016;Dawe and Robinson, 2017). While most of these accounts openly advocate the formal use of Wikipedia in academic practices (see, e.g., Hafner et al, 2015;Walker and Li, 2016;Freire and Li, 2016;Meseguer-Artola et al, 2016;Di Lauro and Johinke, 2017), it is acknowledged that, in the university context, there are still important concerns among scholars regarding the use of this online encyclopedia (Llados et al, 2013;Aibar et al, 2015;Konieczny, 2014Konieczny, , 2016, even though such concerns have diminished over the last few years (Shachaf, 2009;Soules, 2015). As regards students, other studies suggest that there is also some resistance to openly using Wikipedia, especially due to a lack of value in terms of how useful and credible they consider it to be (Meseguer-Artola, 2014;Selwyn and Gorard, 2016;Huang et al, 2016).…”