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Teaching with Wikipedia: How Heather Sharkey Uses Wikipedia Assignments to Transform Student Learning

Image of Van Pelt Library on Penn Campus

24Oct’24

Feature Stories, Spotlights

October 24, 2024 by Erin Bartnett

This year, Heather Sharkey has been named to the inaugural Wiki Education Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the goal of the project is to enhance more inclusive coverage of the humanities on Wikipedia and encourage North American college students to participate in the Wikipedia-writing process. As part of her membership on the committee, Sharkey has created a libguide resource to enable other professors at Penn to incorporate Wikipedia assignments into their teaching.  

While working on the libguide, Sharkey met with CETLI to share insights on the impact teaching with Wikipedia has had on her teaching, what she does to introduce the assignment to students, and how the assignment creates a collaborative classroom.  

Can you talk about how teaching with Wikipedia has impacted your teaching values or goals? Have they changed or evolved? 

Teaching with and writing for Wikipedia is intellectually exhilarating because of the way Wikipedia works – which I didn't realize before I started doing it. No article is a fixed product. Every article on Wikipedia is collaborative, open to possible revision or expansion. And what that means is that you do not have to be the absolute expert on the topic. In fact, you're not. But you might know a little piece of a story that you can add. So, for me and my students, it has enabled us to make contributions to subjects that we might not have thought we were the world's experts on before we did it. But we can make contributions anyway! We can verify it with sources. We can help society and public scholarship and not worry that we're messing things up, because we know that somebody else might come and improve on what we have done. 

Over time, I've increasingly moved towards the collaborative model, and the cool thing about it is that I feel like I'm working with my students – that we are a team. That kind of collaboration is really rewarding. It's also more important than ever in the post-COVID landscape, where people can be very isolated.  Having opportunities for low- pressure but high-value scholarship ends up being a really fun and nice thing to do in a classroom setting. 

So, writing for Wikipedia does multiple things at once. It forces you to be clear and scholarly. You have to give citations. You have to be aware of copyright. You can do things collaboratively. You can end up tussling in a satisfying way over your word choice—how do you convey an idea effectively? There are just so many skills that it touches on and it feels, again, intellectually exhilarating. 

"A lot of the students also find themselves questioning, in productive ways, what the strengths and weaknesses of a source like Wikipedia are."

How do you frame these assignments for students when you introduce them to it?  What do you think is crucial to communicate with them about the purpose of the project?  

A few things. I regard the Wikipedia assignment as a way for them to improve their research and writing skills that will extend into academic research projects, as well as into the jobs that they end up pursuing after Penn. Whether they go into consulting or medicine or law—I tell them that they can transfer everything they learn, including these skils, because these are skills of expression. 

I also emphasize to them that writing for Wikipedia is a public service. We are very privileged at Penn to have access to abundant resources, but many people in the world don't. And there are paywalls. People outside a well-resourced institution like Penn can't access journal articles the way we can. Wikipedia is a really important resource because it's free for many people in the world. 

A lot of the students also find themselves questioning, in productive ways, what the strengths and weaknesses of a source like Wikipedia are. They remember what their elementary and middle school and high school teachers told them—"Don't use Wikipedia. It's not reliable.” And actually, I don't let them use Wikipedia for research articles either, which I have to really emphasize. If you were doing a research project on the politics of Wikipedia on a particular topic, a Wikipedia article or talk page might then become the equivalent of a primary source material. You could use it in a scenario like that. But otherwise, no: I want you to look at Wikipedia, I tell them, but otherwise I want you to use vetted, refereed sources from the Penn Libraries. You need to understand the different purposes, qualities, and registers of scholarly sources. 

I also emphasize to them that they should be writing for Wikipedia as they would for their academic writing assignments—and this surprises them—with a very intelligent middle school reader in mind. Again, their target reader should be a smart middle-school student.  They therefore need to write, or they should try to write, in a way that's super-clear with that audience in mind. If they can extend that quality of writing to their academic writing, it will also be good because it will mean that their writing becomes more accessible and more readable. 

"Chick Pea Sesame Dip" (Homos bi Tahini) from Helen Corey's cookbook, featured on the Wikipedia page Sharkey's class created.

"Scholarship shows that Wikipedia articles are having a growing influence on public discourses. For students, that scholarship offers convincing evidence of their impact and involvement in making history. We are, by the very fact of what we're doing, selecting what is important."

Harnwell Tower viewed from the ground, with a small green tree in the foreground.
Harnwell College House, named after Gaylord Harnwell, who served as president of Penn from 1953 to 1970. Sharkey's class has also contributed to his Wikipedia page.

Where do you start the assignment?  

I start with a Google doc. I have the students do preliminary research, find sources, put the links and summaries in the doc, and we share the whole document. Then, we look at other Wikipedia articles. What are the sections of it? Like in a biography, there's usually the opening paragraph, and then there might be something on early life and family, education, career, publications, legacy, and so on. What are the sections going to be? Then, I give students the assignment to start drafting. I usually divide them into small groups and assign each group to work on one section of the roughly planned article. 

Even though most of the students have read a lot of Wikipedia articles before, they soon discover that, as with everything in life, it's harder to do something yourself once you actually start to do it.  

Some students have difficulty knowing what is appropriate for a Wikipedia article or not. At first, some of them end up almost rehashing somebody's entire CV.  Either that, or they don't realize what are the important elements of someone’s life story, or what makes a person sound worthy of the article or not. What are the accomplishments worth noting? 

After they draft sections, we work together together sometimes to do line-by-line editing. It comes down to literary register as well. We’re trying to aim for points of style, such as using active voice verbs and clear language.  We also check to make sure that the sentences have the right tone – that they sound respectful and neutral, and not ambiguous or confusing. We go through the sentences and try to improve the wording together. 

You’ve previously stated: “It's important that students are aware of their own roles in history and how we are custodians of the past. But they should also be aware that we're making history as we're living it.” Could you talk about how you think the Wikipedia assignment models this for students? 

There are a couple of ways.  

First, when we do articles about things that have a relevance to Penn, students will often realize that they know the places that are being described. For example, in Iranian American history or Penn’s history, one of the people who may come up is Gaylord Harnwell, a nuclear physicist who became president of Penn and who helped to establish a new university in Iran called Shiraz University. A lot of our freshman students live in Harnwell Tower, the building named after Gaylord Harnwell. So then when you realize that you're doing a history and you've lived in the building named after the person that you're writing about, you think, oh my gosh, I know that person! 

Another way is this—in the four or five years now that I've been writing articles, I've started to tell students – and there's scholarship on this as well – about how Wikipedia around the world and in different domains shapes discourses.  

One of the first articles we published was about a woman named Helen Corey who just passed away at over a hundred years old. She was a Syrian American cookbook author. She was somebody who should have had an article years ago, and we wrote an article from scratch. Within a year, a feature appeared on her, which is now online on the state of Indiana website. It turns out that she was an elected official in a town in Indiana; she belonged to the Arab American community of Indiana. And I think it must be the influence of our article—somebody must have Googled her and came up with our Wikipedia article and saw that she was important.  

What makes me convinced that the author of this article on the Indiana website saw our Wikipedia page for her is that their feature replicates some of the language that I suggested using when I was talking to the students. I suggested calling her a “culinary diplomat,” which nobody had done before. People are starting to talk about culinary diplomacy as a field now, but to my knowledge no one had written about this woman before while using that particular phrase. And then I saw this article on the state of Indiana website.

Scholarship shows that Wikipedia articles are having a growing influence on public discourses. For students, that scholarship offers convincing evidence of their impact and involvement in making history. We are, by the very fact of what we're doing, selecting what is important. 

If someone was interested in creating their own Wikipedia assignments, in addition to the libguide that will be available, what advice would you give them?   

The number one piece of advice that I would suggest is that you must do it with the students. The instructor should be hands-on and should do things side-by-side with the students. You should be aware of the challenges and be able to respond to students’ questions and concerns and work effectively in a collaborative way. 

The other thing I would say is that the Wiki Edu Foundation is an amazing resource with their tutorials.  Without them, it wouldn't have been possible for me.  It's so much easier to do it through them and to work with them and have students do the tutorials.  When we have questions about Wikipedia – for example, if we run into a nuts-and-bolts coding issue – we can also write to our assigned Wiki Edu mentor to ask for help or advice. 

Finally, I would say that you really have to stay on top of it – the instructor and students alike. The students need more guidance and more reminders than you would ever think – especially if you want to stay on track to write and publish together a new, high-quality Wikipedia article by the end of the semester. It's a multi-step process. So I would encourage building it into the syllabus, dedicating class time—and it doesn't need to be a lot of class time, it can be even just 20 minutes a week —to talk through the issues.