the future of wikipedia in education

Jake OrlowitzUser:Ocaasi

jorlowitz@gmail.com@JakeOrlowitz

Wikimedia Foundation GranteeWiki Project Med Foundation

Wikipedia Administrator

All content under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

The Future of Wikipedia in Education

An early study in the journal Nature said that in 2005, Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[2]

Between 2008 and 2012, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology,[5] toxicology,[6] oncology,[7] pharmaceuticals,[8] and psychiatry[9] comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high standard.

--Reliability of Wikipedia, Wikipedia

●50% to 90% of physicians

●35 to 70% of pharmacists

●94% of medical students use Wikipedia

Ubiquitous usage

Wikipedia’s scale30m articles, 4m English16 million images

8000 views per second

500 million unique visitors per month3.7 billion monthly mobile pageviews

2.1 billion edits, 700 million English

Wikipedia’s missionImagine a world in which every person on the planet shares in the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we’re doing.

(for free, in the language of their choice)

Wikipedia’s volunteers20 million registered users

120,000 active editors

1,400 administrators

… working for free, with no central control

Wikimedia’s scope286 languages

18 projects

images, data, dictionary, travel guide, species, quotes, books, source material, wiki software...

Wikimedia FoundationSan Francisco

150 employees

Donor funded

Nonprofit

No ads!

Wikipedia’s pillarsNeutral point of view

Verifiability

Consensus

Civility

Open copyright

Wikipedia’s reliabilityAs accurate as Britannica

Errors fixed quickly over time

“Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow”

Virtual filter

Teaches information literacy

1. Edit Filter automatically rejects known vandalism patterns

2. ClueBot reverts and flags suspicious edits with a machine-learning bot

3. Humans review malicious changes tagged with language recognition tools

4. Vandalism patterns are checked against metadata and historical trends

5. Recent changes patrollers scroll through new edits

6. Editors alerted to each change on all pages in their article watchlist

7. Specialists and experts report and fix mistakes when they see them

8. Millions of readers identify and correct errors when they come upon them

9. Link blacklists lock out known spam sites and unreliable sources

10. Detection mechanisms to determine conflict of interest

11. Administrators to block disruptive editors and protect pages

Multiple safeguards

Featured, Good articles

Semi-formal peer review

Total: 4,000 FAs and 10,000 GAs

Frequently written by experts

Primarily by one or by a few people

[20]

Pedagogical Benefit● Engaged students, global audience, realworld purpose

● Unique assignment, peer feedback, cool and different

● Media literacy, identify bias, evaluate credibility

● Constructing knowledge, content gaps

● Discourse, collaboration, community of practice

● Expository writing, literature review, citation

● Critical thinking, process reflection

● Plagiarism, close paraphrasing, copyright

● Digital citizenship, online etiquette, wiki code

Plagiarism

Education ProgramStarted with 2010 Public Policy Initiative

20,000 printed pages

6,000 Wikipedia articles

Mission Alignment:

Increasing participation

Increasing quality

Questions?

jorlowitz@gmail.comeducation@wikimedia.org