Abstract
Sociologist Piotr Konieczny focuses on the issue of Wikipedia’s reception in the world of academia: in the background of slowly growing acceptance of it as an educational tool, why is a significant portion of the researchers and instructors still uneasy with it?
This Wikipedia project made a world of difference [for me] in being able to write well. And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that [my] article is being read by 80+ people a day. [one of the author’s students]
Is Wikipedia really the barbarian at the gates of the ivory tower? Since its arrival on the scene, Wikipedia was has been considered by many academics as an interloper rather than a source of legitimate production and distribution of knowledge. Whether or not they use it themselves, faculty commonly instruct students that Wikipedia is not an authenticated or reliable research source. But this may be changing. Some scholars are now arguing that Wikipedia is a new pedagogical tool for democratizing the production of knowledge and developing shared learning communities.
A primary reason for academic reservations about Wikipedia is philosophy of knowledge based on the control and management of intellectual capital.
Despite strong initial suspicion and resistance, today, Wikipedia use in academia is being covered much more favorably by the news media. Headlines such as: “Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?”; “Wikipedia Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms”; and “Student Assigned to Read a Wikipedia Article That She Wrote” [for another Assignment] suggest that attitudes may be shifting. Many recent news stories are based on testimonials of educators who declare that Wikipedia is an effective source for igniting student research processes, an innovative tool for transforming the learning experience, and a means for fostering engagement with the general public.
What are the potential benefits that Wikipedia might offer students and academics? Can it democratize learning and advance public sociology, as some pundits claim?
The Age of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia has become one of the iconic sites of the Web 2.0: the new Internet where users are no longer passive consumers of content, but instead contribute their own content as part of a virtual, social media-fueled community. Wikipedia is consistently ranked in the top ten of the most popular websites in the world (and the only nonprofit organization in that group). A critical element of the Wikipedia project is that it is self-governed: run by an online community of contributors (commonly referred to as “editors” or “Wikipedians”) who are responsible for creating the site’s content. This content has been free and available to the public since the website’s founding. In this regard, Wikipedia can be seen as a social movement founded on a vision of creating a world where everyone has open access to encyclopedic knowledge.
Twelve years into Wikipedia’s existence many academics use Wikipedia regularly. Yet, these same scholars still mistrust it and misunderstand how it works. For instance, many suspect, erroneously, that Wikipedia’s dominance as an information provider reflects a corporatist-capitalist motivation to sell a product that will corrupt students and “dumb down” knowledge. It’s not uncommon for instructors to prohibit the use of Wikipedia as a research source for student papers, and, in some cases, such as Middlebury College in 2007, entire universities ban Wikipedia.
But, the perception of Wikipedia appears to be changing among academics. As observed in a recent PEW “How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms” report, almost 90 percent of educators in the United States use Wikipedia in some fashion. In the last few years, professional academic organizations have actively begun to endorse teaching with Wikipedia, beginning with the American Psychological Society and quickly followed by our own American Sociological Association. Presidents of both organizations have expressed support for using Wikipedia in a classroom. In 2011 the ASA launched an initiative to encourage sociologists to teach with Wikipedia. This growing acceptance of Wikipedia can be traced, in part, to a growing movement to democratize knowledge.
Illustrations by Corey Fields
Democratizing Knowledge
According to many studies, academics consistently express doubts about whether Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing approach to knowledge production can really outperform the traditional peer-review model of the academy. Education specialist Henk Eijkman observes that a primary reason for these reservations about Wikipedia is philosophy of knowledge based on the control and management of intellectual capital. He notes that many academics who resist the use of Wikipedia in the classroom or in their scholarship do so because they view Wikipedia as threatening to the traditional (gate-controlled) model for producing knowledge. This perception holds despite the fact that numerous peer-reviewed studies, such as “Reliability on Wikipedia” have pointed out that many Wikipedia articles are at a level of quality similar to peer-reviewed encyclopedia articles.
The genius of Wikipedia is that is calls into question and boldly challenges the supposed hegemony of the insular peer-review process.
Wikipedia emerged in the bloom of what has been dubbed by some as the Academic Spring. This social movement started among reformist academics who viewed current institutional and cultural norms in academia as obsolete in the Digital Age. With the advent of near-free, media-rich asynchronous communication, traditional publishing practices have gained the reputation of being too slow, not inclusive enough, and too profit oriented. It can take years to get a paper published, but it takes only a few hours to get similar information featured on a blog. And published papers are often hidden behind paywalls, making them inaccessible to a majority of world’s population. But blogs and Wikipedia articles have no such limitations. Additionally, authors often have to sign away the rights to their ideas in order to receive a contract with a traditional publisher, and they rarely receive compensation, whereas most publishing companies turn a handy profit margin. Alongside Wikipedia, the rise of open access journals and academic blogs signal a turn toward more democratic, less managed forms of knowledge production.
Wikipedia democratizes both the knowledge production process and the ways in which communities access or engage with knowledge. In the traditional models, vetted experts—often academics—have been the primary providers of knowledge. Wikipedia disrupts the knowledge-power arrangement that often makes technical knowledge the exclusive property of credentialed academics and selective academic institutions. Anybody can edit Wikipedia—that means experts and amateurs alike. There are respected academics editing Wikipedia, but they are a small minority among the mass of volunteers, many of whom are students or young professionals. Most Wikipedians share a set of common values: they like the idea of volunteering to share knowledge (many see this not only as a common good, but as fun to do); they believe that information should be free; and they appreciate Wikipedia’s philosophy of openness and collaboration.
Wikipedia democratizes the knowledge production process and the ways in which communities access or engage with knowledge.
Engaging Students
Students are likely to share these values, at least to the extent that they’re not yet fully assimilated into the credentialed knowledge-power mindset of the academy. For the most part, they inhabit a world in which a tremendous amount of information and entertainment is relatively open and freely available in terms of both production and distribution. They are the first generation to come of age entirely in an environment of computer-mediated communication. They have never not known the ease of accessing information at their fingertips. Within this context, confining the sources by which they can obtain information to “legitimated” academic venues requires a more elaborate rationale than one based on claims to the authority of traditional educational knowledge sources. They simply don’t buy it. Additionally, mediated forms of communication such as Facebook enable them to easily and effectively produce and share ideas and information with a global community of friends, associates, and even complete strangers. Venues that promise the widespread diffusion of information are likely to be much more enticing than paper assignments that have no potential audience beyond the instructor.
Assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia articles can be a valuable innovation to the venerable writing assignment. Instead of seeing their papers read by the instructor, shredded, and forgotten within hours, they get to see their work incorporated into the largest reference work in existence. When my own students realize that their assignment is not going to be forgotten, but instead will be read and commented on by people all over the world, they feel empowered. They are much more engaged in the research process when they have an opportunity to demonstrate that they have sufficient knowledge and skills to contribute to a major information source. Suddenly the dreaded writing assignment becomes meaningful and enjoyable.
In my classes I often assign students to expand Wikipedia articles on sociological topics. Working in groups of three to five, they have created or significantly expanded articles on sociological topics such as “American family structure,” “family honor,” “college and university dating,” “polyethnicity,” “history of family,” “food power,” “joint custody (USA),” to name but a few. It is really not difficult to turn such activities into learning experiences, motivating students by showing them how their works get dozens if not hundreds of page views a day, and creating lasting resources for the entire world. Their work can be subsequently improved by further classes. The article on “double burden,” reaching approximately 100 page views a day, was improved by my students in 2011, and has since been subject to further edits by two classes from Rice University. I look forward to a day we will be able to coordinate such learning activities across numerous classes worldwide.
Under the guidance of faculty, students working on Wikipedia-based assignments have the potential to significantly improve the quality of knowledge contained in the articles they work on. Under the auspices of a recent APS Wikipedia Initiative, Carnegie Mellon scholars Farzan Rosta and Robert E. Kraut analyzed the efforts of 640 undergraduate and graduate students who edited Wikipedia articles on scientific topics in 36 university courses. They found that the students had made major improvements to almost a thousand articles, bringing them to a level similar to that of other major academic reference works. This project, and others like it, engage students and scholars in reviewing Wikipedia material for accuracy and usefulness. This gives a quasi-peer reviewed status to the material, but the process is immediate and open to anyone for further discussion, revision, or rebuttal. What’s important to note about these projects is that the integrate elements of the traditional academic method into open information production aspects of Wikipedia. To this extent, it can be said that it brings academics—and especially students—out of the ivory tower and into to the streets of general knowledge production and use. This is knowledge democracy in action.
The genius of Wikipedia is that is calls into question and boldly challenges the supposed hegemony of the insular peer-review process that has come to shape academic life. Many articles on Wikipedia have wide readership reaching tens of thousands a day. Many of us dedicate our careers to teaching the world about social issues yet refuse to embrace a powerful globally available means for conveying that knowledge to a general population. Academics who do desire to incorporate Wikipedia in their pedagogical and research practices must contend with an academy in which there is little merit or peer-recognition that comes along with integrating Wikipedia into one’s teaching and scholarship. In most cases, this engagement is seen as heretical to traditional academic performance.
It is not my intention, with this essay, to call for a shift in our priorities from research and teaching to writing Wikipedia articles. Yet as long as we support the idea of public sociology, my hope is that we will transcend the insular academic discourse and find our way to engaging with wider audiences. Wikipedia is one very promising path for realizing a more engaged and engaging public sociology.