Wikipedia:Education Board/Wikipedia Studies

See Wiki Education Foundation for more current information on the organization that these pages refer to.

The Working Group has agreed that it would like WEF-USCA, when financially and operationally possible, to focus on endorsing and improving “Wikipedia Studies”. Since this is mentioned at a few points in the proposal, here is an introductory essay about what “Wikipedia Studies” is and why it matters to this organization.

Wikipedia Studies
In response to the 'Innovation' and 'Outsider Perception' sections of the “Future Picture”. The academy does now study Wikipedia. Computer Science investigates Wikipedia as a computer network phenomenon. Social Scientists study who participates in Wikipedia, their interactions, and their collaborative style. Economists attempt to understand why people work with tireless dedication without pay. Business schools are interested in how the knowledge base can be tapped to improve efficiencies and reach new markets. And rhetoricians are interested in how writing itself is affected when readers not only write back to authors, but also delete their words. If the purpose of academe is to create and disseminate original knowledge, the current state of its engagement with Wikipedia is active and healthy by its own traditions.

But the knowledge produced by these projects is by the lights and the epistemologies of each enquirer. As biologists seek to understand the world of life around us, they bring the lenses of scientists, and report back to fellow scientists. While they might not be oblivious to the question of whether the larger public understands their work, the translation of that knowledge to the larger public is beyond their concern. So too are most of the forays of higher education in to Wikipedia: the information they yield is driven by the disciplinary concerns of knowledge communities which spawn them; the fifth largest, and most active, website in the world is largely unaffected by their findings.

Even as the inquiries of Higher Education in to Wikipedia are sporadic and unorganized, the need for sustained cooperation between the Wikipedia community and higher education continues to grow. Consider that recent studies show that much of the “low hanging fruit” of English Wikipedia contributing has now been plucked. Though there is clearly additional room and permanent need for contributions from a broad base of public users, the trend of these studies on the growth of knowledge base within the English language Wikipedia indicates that as the on-wiki data matures, it needs more specialized knowledge contributions. The Fight Club page is well-developed; the page for the filmmaking technique of Pathécolor needs a little help. The latter types of contributions random users might be less likely to have, while the specialized users of the academy might. How does Wikipedia identify these new contributors? Will the methods that have worked in the past to attract contributors continue to work in the future? What types of motivations are in play?

The Wikipedia contributing community could benefit from a more structured partnership with the sustained communities of expertise found in the academy. As has been demonstrated in German language Wikipedia, it is possible to structure periodic dialogue between the contributing community and academic experts, with the academic community providing reviews and guidance when requested. What has been less explored is structuring these interactions so that the existing academic commitment to public service can be tapped as a motivation for participation: acknowledgement of advising Wikipedia development could fit within the traditional tenure and promotion process for academics and perhaps a badging system for reviewed content.

And, of course, Wikipedia has been used for years now as a teaching platform. Though many of the editors who worked with the India Education Program may disagree, student contributions to Wikipedia represent an important introduction of the site to thousands of experts in training who might have been dissuaded from ever using the site, much less understanding how to participate within it. Unfortunately many in the Academy still discredit Wikipedia as a research tool, but fail to understand how teaching students to enter the Wikipedia editing community is an excellent pedagogical tool.

So the Academy has a lot to offer Wikipedia: specialized knowledge contributions to individual pages by both students and experts, review and advising functions within WikiProject communities, study of the role and place of Wikipedia within the culture and economy, and perhaps even advocacy for the roles it shares with Wikipedia -- knowledge production and education.

What does Wikipedia have to offer the Academy?
Wikipedia is arguably the most significant development in the collection and access of human knowledge in history. And most members of the Academy still obsess over students citing it in their term papers. In the limited debate over the reliability of a crowd-sourced reference, most academics miss the real potential. The academy needs to understand how the Wikipedia mission of making the sum of human knowledge freely accessible translates in to a powerful tool to for education and research, perhaps limitless in its transformative potential. How does global education change when knowledge is freely available? How do these two communities realize their shared goals? What permanent facility gives structure and support to their mutual inquiries? Many academics are indeed interested in a more structured engagement with Wikipedia, and, in fact, already participate in a community identified as “Wikipedia Studies.” At the time of writing, 58 academics from across the globe have registered on the site as holding that subject in interest, and have posted more than 95 research papers focusing on that topic.

Indeed, as the Wikimedia Foundation realizes from the Higher Education Summit it sponsored in 2011, there is ample interest and engagement in Wikipedia from academics along several tracks: Learning the technical and community rules of editing, understanding the roles of ambassadors and teaching support documents, how to effectively support class goals with Wikipedia, and understanding Wikipedia culture. The Summit represented not only the culmination of the Public Policy Initiative, but a substantial investment in higher education by the Wikimedia Foundation. That investment continues to pay dividends today, as academics who attended the Summit continue to teach with Wikipedia.

Thus, Wikipedia Studies already exists. Heretofore it has been defined primarily as the contribution to Wikipedia as a teaching tool. But if it is to grow, inform, and promote the mutual goals of higher education and Wikipedia, it needs a sustained, sponsored framework. A center of gravity. Thus, we have proposed that the new enterprise will have four main goals: The new structure will have four main goals: 1. Support and promote teaching and learning with Wikipedia; 2. Build community around teaching and learning with Wikipedia; 3. Support the research of Wikipedia, its role with the larger information culture, and 4. Promote Wikipedia Studies – an academic field which supports the overlapping roles of Higher Education in creating and disseminating original knowledge, and Wikipedia in providing free access to the sum of human knowledge.