Mediating at the student/Wikipedia Intersection

1. Mediating at the student/Wikipedia Intersection Angela Doucet Rand, MLIS University of S. AL Baldwin County Campus arand@usouthal.edu #OCLS2010

3. Agenda What’s in Wikipedia? Wikipedia: What and Why Wikipedia: What’s in it? Compared to? Mediating at the student/Wikipedia intersection What others are doing Questions/Comments What are you doing? Does Wikipedia provide content suitable for student use? Depth, breadth, outbound links

4. What’s in Wikipedia Wikipedia receives 8,291,487 views per hour to the English edition, making it one of the top ten popular web sites. And who goes there? A report in Nature (Giles, 2005) reveals surprising data. In comparing Wikipedia to the print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia was found to have about 3 errors in a science entry compared to 4 in a Britannica entry. As of April 1, 2009 Wikipedia contains more than 2,820,744 articles and has 75,000 active contributors. The encyclopedia has articles in over 260 languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About).

5. Wikipedia is not limited by type and paper. Coverage Depth breadth • Biased toward popular culture • Musical artists & movies • NEW music & movies • Larger countries • Richer countries • Naval sciences, the sciences and music are all topics well covered in Wikipedia, but the music coverage includes articles written by fans on music groups. • compared Wikipedia topical coverage to several printed scholarly encyclopedias covering linguistics, poetry and physics. Overall Wikipedia’s coverage of topics is greater than the print editions of encyclopedias.

6. Wikipedia reflects the immediate interests of its contributors • A noted gap in Wikipedia over print articles is in the fields of law and medicine, probably because these are fields dominated by licensed experts who may only currently be contributing to professional print mediums

7. Measuring credibility • Analyzing the age of edits to articles in Wikipedia • analysis revealed that editing of articles occurs at different times in the life cycle of an article and that 20% of edit errors occur early in the creation of the article. • Suggestions for color coding edits, based on age and number of edits, so that at a glance sections of an article can be determined to be in stasis (accurate) or in flux (in need of validation). • measure author credibility by measuring the number of inputs by one author to an article as a sign of content authority. • In a social network like Wikipedia contributors will stake out a domain in which they possess expertise and defend it from reversions, through to a relatively stable edited version.

8. Mapping author contributes in domains and within categories could be a measure of content validity in that domain. The interesting idea here is that the social construct is being examined for its contribution to the knowledge system Wikipedia.

9. Mediation at the crossroad • Wikipedia culture supports the idea that errors in entries will be corrected eventually by one of the 75,000 active contributors. • Part of the reason for its popularity with students is its easy to use and it is free (Rainie, 2007). • Search engine ranking drives the appearance of Wikipedia results in the top returned hits of many searches. Students using Google to search for articles will likely be presented with a Wikipedia reference in the top ten lists of results. Wikipedia courts verifiability, not truth.

10. Students do work • Pollard (2008) used Wikipedia to introduce History 400 students to a real world experience as historians. • Students were directed to contribute scholarly articles to Wikipedia. • Students learned not only the rigors of insuring content validity but also how to collaborate with others in their field of study. • Students gained digital literacy skills and acknowledge the importance of checking resources.

12. Article traffic Article traffic statistics demonstrate the size of the public for our work. These are the figures for March, 2008: Gabriel GarcíaMárquez: 62,170 views. Or c. 740,000 views per year. Mario Vargas Llosa: 11,869 views. Or c. 140,000 views per year. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: 5,142 views.Or c. 61,000 views per year.

13. Dr. John Wasserman

14. Media and education theorists such as Henry Jenkins have cited Wikipedia as an exemplar test case in the development of new media literacies. As Jenkins points out, these new literacies do not replace traditional ones, they build upon them. • "Today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem- solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too... In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing." - Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation http://nanton.olt.ubc.ca/Adventures_In_Wikipedia

16. Literacy skills Does digital collaboration increase information acquisition? Is collaboration through digital literacy an asset in a knowledge building conversation?

17. Thank you! Questions? Comments? Idea? @allonsdanser SL: Ginseng LeFevre Flickr: allonsdasner1