Waking Students Up to Systemic Bias: Using Wikipedia From a Critical Pedagogy Perspective

Abstract

Waking students up to injustice and systemic bias, which doesn’t necessarily impact them personally, is of concern to many within the higher education sector. Using a Freirean conceptual framework this paper demonstrates that using Wikipedia in a particular way can be effective in doing just that. Students in a first-year seminar module in Ireland learning about the social construction of knowledge were asked to explore topics on Wikipedia that they had a personal interest in and present back to the class on what they found. In reflective learning journals it was evident that the students became more aware of systemic bias, not just in Wikipedia but in other areas of their lives and beyond their lived experience. The authors present this as a potentially useful way to engage with privileged students to transform their understanding of systemic bias, develop empathy for others’ lived experience and develop critical thinking skills.

Introduction

This paper explores the use of Wikipedia to teach about systemic bias. We proceed from a critical pedagogy perspective and argue that engaging students with Wikipedia helps them to “name their world,” explore their thematic universe, and engage in a more critical way with the world. Paolo Freire, often cited as the founder of critical pedagogy, worked together with his students to generate responses to their lived experiences in order to clearly see the structures of power that impact on them and then, in seeing clearly the structures of power, to speak up, critique them and change them (Freire, 1972).

The method we employed was to curate student engagement with Wikipedia over the course of several weeks. Students used a written learning journal to reflect on their experience with Wikipedia during and after their engagement with the platform. We then performed an inductive analysis of student writing to see if Freirean themes were present in their reflections. The student writing provides empirically grounded evidence to show that engagement with Wikipedia, when curated and scaffolded, can serve as a key to unlock Freirean conscientization.

Freire worked with impoverished people in Brazil in the 1970s. Although we work with a very different cohort of people (first-year undergraduate students in a western European context) we argue that Freire’s insights and his methods are relevant and central to our pedagogy, serving as a useful basis for “waking students up” to injustice and inequality in their world and beyond. Within this pedagogical context, Wikipedia offers a culturally relevant way to bring students into contact with themes and topics to which they can easily relate and, from there, start to think about how they relate to the world and critique it (Ladson-Billings, 1995, pp. 483–484). Following the Freirean approach for engaged teachers we guide students “to become conscious of their presence in the world” (Freire and Betto, 1985 cited in Macedo & Araújo Freire, 2005, p. xvi). This begins with an exploration of themes and topics of interest to them on Wikipedia. We then explore how bias is manifest in these themes and topics. This engagement is further scaffolded by providing students with an introduction to the social construction of knowledge on Wikipedia—the rules and policies that govern editors’ production of knowledge on the platform. We suggest also that engaging with Wikipedia in this way is a useful method to engage more privileged students (Allen & Rossatto, 2009) in the process of waking up to injustice. With the development of Chat GPT and other large language model AIs, skills in discerning bias and critically engaging with texts is particularly important (Fuchs, 2023).

This paper begins with a discussion of critical pedagogy in the context of the students we teach in an Irish university. We then discuss the usefulness of Wikipedia as a tool to wake students up to systemic bias and subsequently, how we used Wikipedia in our classrooms. Finally, we share detail from our students’ learning journals which show that the students found engaging critically with Wikipedia around topics that they were interested in helped them to wake up to bias in other contexts.

Critical Pedagogy

At the beginning of his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire (1972) argues that “[w]hile the problem of humanization has always been, from an axiological point of view, man’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality” (p. 20). Our 21st century Global North students are very different to the students Freire worked with. Their dehumanization and anomie take a different form than Freire’s students. Our students are materially quite privileged and their attendance at university demonstrates this.

However, the students we teach do face a number of intersectional challenges that point to a lack of privilege in the context of Irish higher education. The university where we are based, Maynooth University, has the highest number of Access students of any university in Ireland (Maynooth University, 2025). The Access Office works with students who are traditionally under-represented at third level institutions, such as students from lower socio-economic demographics, students with learning difference or people who are differently abled, Mincéirí students (members of the Irish Traveller community) and mature students (students over 23 years of age). Another area where students’ lack of privilege may be evident is their experience of term-time employment. Anecdotally we have noticed that most of our students work during term and some work more hours each week than is recommended for those studying full-time. According to research by Brooks (2018) “term-time employment is disproportionately taken up by students with no prior family experience of higher education” (p. 504). Brooks (2018) also states that 85% of Irish students in Higher Education work in paid employment which is high compared to other European countries.

Another area where our students’ experiences coincide with the experiences of the people Freire worked with is through the “banking system” of education which has been the defining trait of secondary school education in Ireland. As Freire describes:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness (Freire, 1972, p. 45).

Narration in this way, with the knowing subject (the teacher) explaining things to the unknowing objects of their teaching (the students) leads students “to memorize mechanically the narrated content” (Freire, 1972, p. 45) rather than engaging critically with the content. In contrast, Freire (1972) argues that “[l]iberating education consists in acts of cognition not transferrals of information” (p. 53). Freire advocates a “problem-posing” rather than a banking method of education.

Our first-year students are a diverse group, in the Irish context, the majority of whom come straight from secondary school into university after completing the Leaving Certificate (the state examination for university entrance). The literature analyzing the learning outcomes of the Leaving Certificate are limited. A recent paper found that overall it is lower order learning skills that are assessed through the Leaving Certificate which is completed by 90% of school-going 17–19 year-olds (Burns et al., 2018). A survey of students at the end of their first year at an Irish university concludes, “Regrettably, the findings of this research suggest that the majority of undergraduate students, upon reflecting on their first year at college, do not regard the LCP [Leaving Certificate Programme] as having been a good preparation for higher education” (O’Leary & Scully, 2018, p. 19). In informal discussion with students in our Critical Skills classes, after learning about plagiarism and referencing, the students often conclude that they plagiarized their Leaving Certificate. For example, to assist students to prepare for the exam teachers may give students sample answers to questions. The students tend to learn these answers by memory for the exam. This anecdotal evidence is corroborated in O’Leary and Scully (2018) who summarize that students stated that the Leaving Certificate “involved a great deal of rote learning and memorization—in stark contrast to their first-year coursework, which had frequently challenged them to evaluate various sources of information and evaluate this information independently” (p. 18) In short, the Leaving Certificate is an archetypical example of banking pedagogy and students come to university lacking skills in critical thinking and lacking practice in “naming their world” (Freire, 1972). Unfortunately, this “Tyranny of Content” often continues into university learning (Petersen et al., 2020).

However, in 2015 Maynooth University established Critical Skills to provide a process-based approach to writing, public speaking, and critical information literacy. Critical Skills is loosely modeled after a First Year Seminar found in many North American Universities (Skipper, 2017). However, due to the Leaving Certificate, Irish students need less help with study skills for content-focused classes with exam-based assessments. This allows Critical Skills to focus more on the development of communication skills and information literacy. Crucially, Critical Skills offers a seminar style class to first year students which is exceptional in the Irish context. This allows dialogue and development of a peer group between students and between the students and the instructor. Such dialogue is central to critical pedagogy and building a relationship of trust with the student. Although Critical Skills is not primarily based around a critical pedagogy methodology, opportunities arise though the course to offer students “[c]onscientization calls” (Freire, 2021). These are opportunities to become aware of systemic bias that we encounter throughout our lives. Critical Skills offers such opportunities, in a supportive environment, for students to explore these issues. Critical Skills is an optional class, but one that is graded and credit-bearing. It has typically enrolled about a third (one thousand) of Maynooth University’s incoming students. Its central syllabus is developed collaboratively and ensures consistency across dozens of seminars.

Wikipedia, Praxis, and Critical Pedagogy

When Paolo Freire works with his students, he is trying to help wake them up to the reality they live in. He argues that “[t]here is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Freire, 1972, p. 60). Everyone has the right to name the world for themselves—to name their world. When we have students engage with Wikipedia we are trying to do two things. We want to help them to become more critical about the information they engage with instead of just consuming information uncritically. We also wish to disrupt their “business-as-usual” view of the world and wake them up to the bias, discrimination, and systemic injustice that exists in the world and is reproduced on and through Wikipedia. This latter intention is also of course based in Freire’s critical pedagogy. In the spirit of critical pedagogy Adams et al. (2007) state, “our interactions with individuals, institutions, and cultural norms and values, constitutes a cycle of business as usual until we are able to interrupt it with information or experiences that call into question the truth of what we have learned about the power relationships among different social groups and our own position vis-à-vis these dynamics” (p. 41). As well as attempting to break students out of their usual passive way of engaging with information we are also attempting to wake them up to the unequal power relationships that exist in the world. Wikipedia is a tool that we have used to wake the students up to injustice and inequality and it is a very useful tool to engage with for these purposes.

Wikipedia is a particularly useful tool when attempting to engage students from the global north in this work; students who are privileged within a global context. Allen and Rossatto (2009) ask the question of whether adjustments might be made within the critical pedagogy paradigm in order to engage those who benefit more from systemic privilege. They ask this question in the light of resistance from this cohort of students to critical pedagogy. They suggest that placing the identity development of that cohort of student at the center of the investigation is important.

Acknowledging the complexity of the students’ identities and their experiences of privilege and lack of privilege is a useful addition to the work of waking students up to systemic bias. Kimberle Crenshaw’s work investigating the intersection of racism and sexism in black women’s lives has provided the language and concepts to bring nuance and make visible the intersectional nature of our identities (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). As Yang (2016) argues in relation to Freire’s concepts of oppressed and oppressor “it is essential to contextualize the oppressed and the oppressor” (836). The students in our Critical Skills classes come with a mixture of privilege and lack thereof, as mentioned earlier. As part of our work to explore systemic bias we had informal opportunities in our classes to discuss privileges as well as challenges that our students face. These conversations also came out of the things students were noticing on Wikipedia. We found that Wikipedia offers a way for students to explore their identities by finding pages that are of interest to them. In our experience an exploration of the bias found in those pages, chosen or discovered by students, wakes students up to read the world in a more critical way. In other words, this exercise provided an opportunity for conscientization. The discussion of how and why bias manifests within Wikipedia lead to a discussion about systemic bias in other contexts.

The very size and reach of Wikipedia and the extent of the bias in it was a wakeup call to our students. Wikipedia is a ubiquitous source of knowledge, consistently ranking in the top websites globally (“Statistica” 2022). There are two unique elements to Wikipedia’s global ranking. First, Wikipedia is banned in China in all languages which deprives it of 800 million potential readers (Lee, 2019). Second, it has the highest percentage of traffic, 53.5%, generated by search engines of any site in the top 50. In addition, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri all draw upon Wikipedia for answers to user searches (Withers, 2018). Taken together, the page views, time on site, traffic from search engines, and integration into digital platforms, solidify Wikipedia’s position as the dominant source of knowledge in the world. Thus, the importance of Wikipedia in terms of its reach and its capacity to inform societal discourses is difficult to overstate. The power that Wikipedia has to shape understanding of issues should be carefully communicated to students.

Recent case studies attest to the hegemony of Wikipedia in the information landscape. Giovanni Colavizza’s analysis of Wikipedia’s coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that editors created over 5000 new articles on the virus with over 400 million page views by June 2020 (Colavizza, 2020). Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley have shown that Wikipedia influences the content of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles (Thompson & Hanley, 2018). Another study showed that adding or improving a Wikipedia article on towns in Spain had a causal effect of increasing overnight tourism visits by 9% with an approximate value of €160,000 per year for individual cities (Hinnosaar et al., 2017). There is also evidence that Wikipedia influences judicial decisions (Thompson et al., 2024). Finally, the widespread use of Wikipedia by university students is well-documented (Lim, 2009; Selwyn & Gorard, 2016; Shen et al., 2013; Todorinova, 2015).

Engaging with Wikipedia in the classroom and encouraging students to use Wikipedia in a critical way rather than avoid it altogether is a powerful way to move away from the banking methods of education. Students are familiar with Wikipedia to some extent and therefore the learning curve when bringing Wikipedia into the classroom is not steep. Wikipedia also includes a broad range of topics. A person is bound to find something of interest to them on Wikipedia. Students use Wikipedia in their personal lives to find out about films, celebrities or sports they are interested in. In their academic study the evidence suggests that students use it, though they may not be so forthcoming to disclose this usage to their instructors. Often students are told by teachers and professors to avoid Wikipedia. As Heidi Jacobs (2010, pp. 179–180) surmises, in doing this we “run the risk of turning information literacy education into the kind of banking education that Paolo Freire cautions against.” So, engaging with Wikipedia in a critical way is a powerful way to encourage students to ask questions about what authority figures tell them. Their familiarity with Wikipedia and the breath of topics that Wikipedia has information about allows the students to use Wikipedia to “name their world.” Through their engagement with Wikipedia students bring into the classroom their own “generative themes” which we can then explore together.

Introducing students to the bureaucratic and less visible aspects of Wikipedia is also valuable for waking students up to name their world and ask questions about it. This allows students to investigate the system and explore why bias is manifested by it. For example, every edit made to Wikipedia is recorded in the site. Students can also explore the “Talk” pages which present all the discussion and argument about what should go on the page. There are a number of principles or pillars which are central to Wikipedia, however, the final pillar is that “Wikipedia has no firm rules” (Wikipedia, pillars). As such, there is plenty of discussion and disagreement in evidence. As Sorin and Caius (2011) argue, conflict is the bread and butter of the development of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia debates about “notability” and “reliable sources” are esoteric and difficult to follow (or participate in) for new users. However, guided by an instructor, helping students to witness and understand the internal workings of Wikipedia is an important part of our process.

Freire and Macedo discuss teaching about conflicts. They argue (Freire & Macedo, 1995) that conflicts cannot be approached in a neutral manner, but rather they are “anchored in those competing histories and ideologies that generated the conflict in the first place” (p. 394). Wikipedia too is anchored in histories and ideologies and it is essential when engaging with Wikipedia in the classroom to present it to students not as a neutral place in which information is organized, but rather as embedded in particular histories and ideologies which impact on how information is presented, who presents it and what information is deemed worthy. The accessibility of Wikipedia by which anybody can edit the page and the transparency of content debates and edits allows us to see behind the scenes. This allows for a very deep investigation not just of the pages, but how they got to be there.

Wikipedia was established in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sangar as a website anybody could make changes to and with the aspiration to become a repository of all human knowledge (Lim, 2009). This latter point begs many questions, such as whose knowledge? And who is responsible for managing and curating it? Quite frankly, this aspiration triggers alarm bells that some knowledge and some methods for coming to knowledge will be privileged over others.

This is particularly important because one of the principles of Wikipedia is that information should be presented from a “neutral point of view.” According to Wikipedia “[a]ll encyclopaedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic” (Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View). Exploring this pillar of Wikipedia is a useful way to have a dialogue with students about the social construction of knowledge and whether it is ever possible to be neutral in our social critique.

Wikipedia suffers from “epistemological narrowness” and “epistemic inequality” as a result of its assumption that “reliable sources” (dominated by Western print and electronic) present an accurate representation of reality (McDowell & Vetter, 2022, pp. 96, 99). Institutions must be understood in the context of their developmental history (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). In this context, Wikipedia’s focus on neutrality and “reliable sources” allows the community of editors to avoid difficult philosophical and moral questions. Ethnographic research shows that Wikipedia’s complex policy structure manages and prevents conflict (Jemielniak, 2014). The policies of Wikipedia have, to use Berger and Luckann’s (1966) formulation, a “controlling efficacy” (73). They govern participation in Wikipedia and access for individuals as producers of knowledge on the platform as distinct from mere consumers. Participation requires embracing both the concept of “reliable sources” and “neutral point of view.” Beyond “reliable sources” there is no room for other epistemological traditions such as feminist (Menking & Rosenberg, 2021) or oral. When these sources are at odds, Wikipedia uses the “consensus” of its editors to determine content while ensuring a “neutral point of view” regarding different, though reliably sourced, perspectives. Wikipedia’s epistemology is a naïve echo of The New York Times’s “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but the results are similar in terms of privileging powerful voices. As Bilić (2015) notes, “Wikipedia perpetuates notions of rationality and rational debate that can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment and the encyclopaedic projects of that era” (p. 1273). Determining what “passes for ‘knowledge’” is a powerful source of privilege and discrimination (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 26).

Exploring the context within which Wikipedia operates is an excellent way to encourage students to think about how systems manifest bias. This then helps students to “imagine alternative subject positions and divergent social designs” as Freire and Macedo advocate. For Freire, exploring the context within which the object of study is investigated is central to critical pedagogy (Freire & Macedo, 1995). This may then lead students to contemplate how other institutions might manifest bias through their processes and practices.

Wikipedia’s bias has been explored widely. Gender bias is endemic (Sun & Peng, 2021; Wagner et al., 2016). Geographic bias both in terms of content and contributors is also profound; Graham et al. (2015) have found that even those people in the Global South who edit the English language Wikipedia, tend to edit pages relating to the Global North. Beytía (2020) argues that the extent of geographical bias is even more widespread than previously thought if we include in our analysis the connections between pages. Indigenous knowledges are also largely missing from Wikipedia. For an information source whose intention is to include the sum of all human knowledge the lack of any aural repositories, the simplistic understanding of “notability,” and the rigid template structure for the Wikipedia pages is problematic (van der Velden, 2013). There are also problems with the informal hierarchy that allows editors with more experience to have more power to change pages than people who are unseasoned, inexperienced editors (Jemielniak, 2014).

Wikipedia and Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom

We have used Wikipedia in a number of different ways in the classroom. In 2016, the first year of using Wikipedia on the Critical Skills course, we asked students to make referenced edits on Wikipedia pages of their choice. The aim of this exercise was to help students to understand the practice of referencing and to help them to develop their research skills. A student came into class one morning annoyed because one of her edits had been removed from the article “Poetry” on English language Wikipedia and she could not understand why. In the process of exploring this edit we noticed very quickly that there was bias on the page. All the images, except for one, were of white, male poets. We asked the class if they noticed anything about the page. It took them a few minutes but eventually a couple of female students spotted the bias and named it. In that moment there was a palpable change in the room with many of the students shocked that they hadn’t noticed the obvious bias sooner. The bias had to be explicitly stated before most of the students saw it. It struck us that what the students seemed to be experiencing was this “act of cognition” that Freire said was so important. This class subsequently had conversations about whether there was bias elsewhere, for example, in the university, in the curriculum, in reading lists, more broadly on the radio or TV or in films.

In subsequent years we have specifically shown students some bias on the page—in particular gender and cultural bias—and then asked them to explore a topic they are interested in and see if they can find any bias. The students have come back with some very interesting examples. One student studied the Wikipedia page for Marvel comics because he had an interest in Marvel. He found that most of the images on the page were of male superheroes, much of the information towards the top of the page was about male superheroes and an image on the Wikipedia page of contemporary writers of Marvel comics consisted only of men (this remains the only photo of Marvel writers as of 22 November 2024). In relation to the point about the images our discussion in class led into a discussion about copyright and the possibility that more recent images (which may include more female superheroes) may not be available for use due to the cost of copyright. In relation to the image of the writers of Marvel comics the student investigated further and typed into Google “female writers of Marvel” and found many examples of female writers that could have been represented on the page.

Another area that was popular among students was sport. A student went to the Wikipedia page “Sport in Ireland” and realized there was no mention on the page of Camogie, a popular Gaelic women’s sport. We added a section as a class, and we also had a discussion in the class about the differing experiences of men and women who play Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) sports. The discussion connected with the students’ interests and ways of seeing the world. By exploring the bias as displayed on Wikipedia in the students’ chosen interests, they were able to see how bias impacts on their lives.

We asked students to write a learning journal and reflect on their experiences of using Wikipedia in this way. We asked them to write about what they learned about systemic bias from doing this exercise. A number of themes which relate back to our twin aims of assisting the students to be more critical with the information they are accessing and helping to open their eyes to the systemic bias and inequality that exists are evident in what the students got from the exercise, and they are presented below.

Students Waking Up From Business-As-Usual—Laying the Foundations of Conscientization

Students shocked that they hadn’t seen the bias previously:

This exercise really opened my eyes to the systemic bias. Scrolling through Wikipedia pages before this exercise I would never have noticed that on some pages there are many pictures of white men and no pictures of non-white men, even if they’re talked about.

The example of the poetry page gave me a huge insight. I noticed that there were no pictures of women because I knew that we were looking for a form of bias. However, I know for a fact that if I was just asked to look at the page I would not have noticed the lack of women and the lack of eastern poetry. Which I found extremely worrying that my brain was tuned that way.

In class we learned about systemic bias and were shown examples of this through Wikipedia pages. I was shocked to see this, and I would have never noticed this prior to learning about this topic. I now see systemic bias everywhere, especially on Wikipedia.

I have never noticed systemic bias until discovering it in class, now I see it in the majority of my lectures from law to business...ie. Most academic business articles are written by men.

Students seeing bias in other contexts:

It came to light for me then [after reading and working with Wikipedia], that information was always systemically biased. I noticed it with regards to my own studies, not just Wikipedia. This changed my attitude to approaching work in other subjects. I noticed a lack of inclusion of women, people of color, and different sexualities. Heteronormativity and systemic bias ruled my education. This discovery both upset and encouraged me to read further in my studies. I broadened my knowledge by doing so, but I feel as though this information I learned should also be a focal point in my education rather than an optional reading.

This week’s Wikipedia exercise taught me many lessons, ones I plan to carry with me throughout my university experience. It was certainly beneficial in the end, as at first I did not believe that looking at Wikipedia would help me in any way. It changed my attitude towards the website. However, it also opened my eyes up to the issue of discrimination and systemic bias both online and offline. I know I will keep note of my discovery when consulting sources for my other subjects.

Students showing empathy for bias that may not affect them directly:

The consequences of [systemic bias] results in a much narrower field of perspective and hence the information publicized is often lacking depth and is one-sided or biased… As a result of systematic bias, the societal grouping with the most weight is given precedence while minority groups are either briefly mentioned or entirely overlooked. Furthermore, institutional bias can have an effect on the mechanisms of society. For example, if only certain groups in society are well established in areas such as literature, music, art and film then the knock-on effect of which is one of dejection. Those in the minority groups may feel dejected and rejected by mainstream society due to this gross misrepresentation. This can extend further and result in certain members of society not wanting to participate in society, which puts all members at a disadvantage because we are missing out on new perspectives, new ideas and new opportunities.

This knowledge of systemic bias will help me in my life as now I will not only look at the content of the text but also are other nations or races in the texts or even other sexes as it is important to give credit where credit is due.

It was shocking to see how blatant systemic bias was on Wikipedia and it is frightening to think about how blatant it is in our society. Moreover, it is probably deeply rooted in society and may easily go unnoticed at times. For instance, prior to this exercise I would have just read information and focused on my interpretation of it: how I related to it and how my societal identity related to it. As a result, if I didn't come across anything unusual for me, I would not question the representativeness of the material. This activity has illustrated just how easy it is to get bogged down in our heads and societal alignments without a second thought for the misrepresentative or lack thereof for other social factions. In this sense, my behavior and how I analyze knowledge will be somewhat more focused. Rather than fixating on myself, I can also attempt to see how the same information may look to someone from a different background to mind. This can now become another indicator that I can use to determine the validity of sources instead of just the academic tier classifications. ¹

Students in Critical Skills show that a Freirean awakening is both powerful and proximate using Wikipedia. We encountered little resistance or defensiveness from students. Rather, students gained a new critical apprehension of Wikipedia and, in turn, their own world. This change achieves a key goal of Freire: “In problem-posing education, men [sic] develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire, 1972, p. 56).

Wikipedia is an increasingly popular destination for higher education instructors interested in developing engaging, meaningful student assignments. Indeed our own interest in Wikipedia began as a simple exercise to increase students’ awareness of and proficiency in referencing. In some ways, our trajectory mirrors that of our peers. “Addressing social inequity” is an important motivation for instructor use of Wikipedia, but overall less important than developing writing skills (Xing & Vetter, 2020). However, as we and our students became familiar with the power structures of Wikipedia and the nature of its biases our pedagogical goals evolved. We concur with Bryce Peake that contributions which, for example, add biographies of women to Wikipedia accede to the rhetorical context of a “gender gap” and do nothing to address Wikipedia’s profound epistemological deficiencies or challenge its Kafkaesque bureaucracy (Peake, 2015). The perversity of this approach is nicely illustrated by the Wikipedia Education Foundation which encourages the use of Wikipedia in higher education to address bias on Wikipedia while limiting its support to institutions outside North America. Recently, Paul Thomas has articulated a more promising strategy that uses access to library repositories to subvert Wikipedia’s fetishization of sources (Thomas, 2020).

We have argued that Wikipedia is an ideal vehicle for achieving the goals of critical pedagogy—a vessel that serves as a starting point for a critical apprehension of the world and the development of praxis. We are less interested in “fixing” Wikipedia through student editing than using it as a tool to wake up students to the injustice and oppression they encounter and experience in the world.

Introducing students to how Wikipedia functions, encouraging them to find pages they are interested in and investigating those pages for bias has been a very useful way to help student to name and see bias that does not necessarily effect them. In a learning journal that students kept as they completed Critical Skills we saw evidence of this. The fact that “behind the scenes” is visible and transparent is a very useful feature of Wikipedia in helping students to see how systems which are epistemologically narrow and unequal will produce bias. In the context of the development of even more powerful systems, namely, artificial intelligence, this type of work is more critical than ever.