Frequently Asked Questions

There are several ways to use your Dashboard course page to see what your students have done on Wikipedia. Which one to use depends on what exactly you're trying to do:

Monitor recent activity

See which live articles have been edited

Evaluate the progess of a student

View work that was removed or reverted

Here are some of the peer reviewed studies on the pedagogical value of teaching with Wikipedia, Wikipedia writing assignments, and related topics.

Perceptions in academia

• Konieczny, Piotr (2016-04-01). Teaching with Wikipedia in a 21st-century classroom: Perceptions of Wikipedia and its educational benefits. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. doi:10.1002/asi.23616. ISSN 2330-1643
• Meseguer Artola, A., Aibar Puentes, E., et al., Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. doi: 10.1002/asi.23488
• Soules, Aline. (2015) Faculty perception of Wikipedia in the California State University System. New Library World Vol. 116 Iss 3/4 pp. 213 - 226
• Xiao, Lu. (2014). "Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open access will improve with more active involvement" (Summary of research paper for London School of Economics' Impact blog).

Science writing for undergrads

• Figuerola, Carlos G.; Groves, Tamar; Quintanilla, Miguel Angel (2015). The Implications of Wikipedia for Contemporary Science Education: Using Social Network Analysis Techniques for Automatic Organisation of Knowledge. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality. TEEM '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 403--410. doi:10.1145/2808580.2808641. ISBN 978-1-4503-3442-6.
• Otfinowski, Rafael and Silva-Opps, Marina. (2015). Writing Toward a Scientific Identity: Shifting From Prescriptive to Reflective Writing in Undergraduate Biology The Journal of College Science Teaching, Vol. 45, No. 2.

Student Learning Outcomes

• Brox, Hilde (2016-04-05). Troublesome tools: How can Wikipedia editing enhance student teachers' digital skills?. Acta Didactica Norge 10 (2): 329--346. ISSN 1504-9922.

Teaching with Wikipedia

• Al-Shehari, Khaled (2017) "Collaborative learning: trainee translators tasked to translate Wikipedia entries from English into Arabic, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer", 11:4, 357-372, DOI: 10.1080/1750399X.2017.1359755
• Barnhisel, G., and Rapchak, M., (2014) Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Crowds. Communications in Information Literacy, Vol. 8 Issue 1.
• Bilansky, Alan. "Using Wikipedia to Teach Audience, Genre and Collaboration." Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 16.2 (2016). Preprint.
• Blumenthal, Helaine, Delia Steverson, Helen Choi, Heather J. Sharkey and Janetta Waterhouse (Column Editors) Serials Spoken Here, Serials Review. 2022.
• Brailas et al. (2015) Wikipedia in Education: Acculturation and learning in virtual communities, in: Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2015.07.002
• Callis et al. (2009). Improving Wikipedia: educational opportunity and professional responsibility. Trends in Ecology and Evolution Volume 24, Issue 4, p177--179
• Carver, B., Davis, R., Kelley, R. T., Obar, J. A., & Davis, L. L. (2012). Assigning Students to Edit Wikipedia: four case studies. E-Learning and Digital Media, 9(3), 273--283
• Ceballos, Diana M., Robert F. Herrick, Tania Carreón, Vy T. Nguyen, MyDzung T. Chu, John P. Sadowski, Helaine Blumenthal, Thais C. Morata Expanding Reach of Occupational Health Knowledge: Contributing Subject-Matter Expertise to Wikipedia as a Class Assignment, INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing. January 2021. doi:10.1177/00469580211035735
• Chen / Reber (2011), Writing Wikipedia articles as course assignment. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computers in Education. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education
• Christensen, Tyler Booth. (2015) "Wikipedia as a Tool for 21st Century Teaching and Learning." International Journal for Digital Society, 6 (2), pp. 1055--1060.
• Cummings (2009), Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing? Inside Higher Ed
• Foster-Kaufman, Amanda. 2019. Wikipedia-Based Assignments and Critical Information Literacy: A Case Study in: Pashia, A., & Critten, J. Critical Approaches to Credit-bearing Information Literacy Courses. Association of College and Research Libraries.
• Freire / Li (2014), "Using Wikipedia to enhance student learning: A case study in economics". Education and and Information Technologies, December 2014.
• Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (2010). How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research. First Monday, 15(3), 1-1. doi: 10.5210/fm.v15i3.2830
• Infeld / Adams (2013), Wikipedia as a Tool for Teaching Policy Analysis and Improving Public Policy Content Online. Journal of Public Affairs Education 19(3), 445--459
• Kennedy et. al. (2015), Turning Introductory Comparative Politics and Elections Courses into Social Science Research Communities Using Wikipedia. PS: Political Science and Politics, 48(2): 378-384
• Jacobson, Trudi and Thomas Mackey. Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers. ALA Neal-Schuman. 2022.
• Konieczny (2012), Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool: Five Years Later. First Monday
• Konieczny, Piotr. (2016) Teaching with Wikipedia in a 21st-century classroom: Perceptions of Wikipedia and its educational benefits. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
• Lampe, C., Zube, P., Velasquez, A., Ozkaya, E., & Obar, J. (2012). Classroom Wikipedia participation effects on future intentions to contribute. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW '12 (p. 403). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
• Roth, A., Davis, R., & Carver, B. (2013). Assigning Wikipedia editing: Triangulation toward understanding university student engagement. First Monday, 18(6). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i6.4340
• Smith Stvan, Laurel. Collaborative group work and increased diversity through Wikipedia editing. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. Vol 6. No. 2. 2021.
• Van Volkenburgh, Elizabeth, et. al. Understanding PlantBehavior: A Student Perspective. Trends in Plant Science. May 2021. Vol. 26. No. 5 425.
• Vetter, Matthew A. Teaching Wikipedia: The Pedagogy and Politics of an Open Access Writing Community. Thesis, 2015, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
• Vetter, Matthew A. "Teaching Wikipedia: Appalachian Rhetoric and the Encyclopedic Politics of Representation." College English, vol. 80, no. 5, 2018, pp. 397-422.
• Wadewitz et al. (2010), Wiki-hacking: Opening up the academy with Wikipedia
• Wannemacher / Schulenburg (2009), Wikipedia in Academic Studies: Corrupting or Improving the Quality of Teaching and Learning?. In: Looking Toward the Future of Technology-Enhanced Education: Ubiquitous Learning and the Digital Native. Martin Ebner and Mandy Schiefner (eds.)
• Wright (2012), Writing Wikipedia Articles as a Classroom Assignment.

Now that your course page is up and running on dashboard.wikiedu.org, you may find these resources helpful in running your Wikipedia assignment.

Tracking student work

The Dashboard will be your main way to see what your students are doing on Wikipedia. Here are more details on how you can use the Dashboard to keep track of student work at different stages of the assignment.

Using your Timeline:

Your timeline is where your students will find the outline for your Wikipedia assignment. There they will find links to relevant handouts and training materials. You can make adjustments to your course timeline at any point throughout the term. Here's how.

Asking for help

On your course page, you'll find a purple "Get Help" button in the upper right corner of the page. Both you and your students can click on this to search our FAQ pages, find relevant resources, or reach out to the appropriate member of the Wiki Education team to assist you.

Wiki Education staff

Your course is being supported by Wiki Education's Classroom Program Manager as well as one of our Wikipedia Experts. You can reach them by email — you'll find it in the Details section of your course page — or via the Get Help button.

Other useful links

• Instructor FAQs
• Student FAQs
• Training modules
• Instructional brochures and handouts
• Adding additional instructors to your course page

If students are having trouble joining your course — for example, reporting that they need a passcode or that the enrollment link you distributed isn't working — the most common issue is that the link you distributed got modified and doesn't include the "enroll" parameter. (This can happen when sending email through some learning mangement systems; the linked text may still show the ?enroll=abcdefg portion of the link, but it isn't part of it.)

On the Students tab of your course page, you can click "Add/Remove Students" to get the enrollment URL (which will change if you modify the course passcode.) Double-check that the link you distributed matches this URL.

If that's not the problem, get in touch with Wiki Education staff via the Get Help button.

How you grade student work is ultimately up to you, but many instructors start from our example gradiing rubric, which can be used as-is or customized to fit the learning objectives of your course.

This blog post covers some additional tips for grading a Wikipedia assignment.

If your students are having trouble getting started because Wikipedia says they are using a blocked IP address, there are several possibilities.

The IP range for the campus may be blocked due to persistent Wikipedia vandalism. In this case, the easiest option is usually to create accounts off-campus; once a student has an account and is logged in, they can edit normally. If students can't easily do this, you can create accounts for them while logged in with your own account, via the Create Account form. You ask for their preferred username, and then select the option to email them a temporary random password.

If your students are editing from a place where Wikipedia is only accessible via VPN (such as mainland China), you can create accounts for them, but they may still be unable to edit; Wikipedia places more stringent restrictions on the shared IP addresses used by public VPNs because of potential abuse by fake accounts. If your students face this problem, contact Wiki Education staff and provide the usernames of the students who need to edit through VPNs and the reason it's necessary. In most cases, we can flag those accounts to permit VPN editing. If your institution runs its own VPN, students may be able to use that VPN without requiring any special permission from Wikipedia; such private VPNs are usually not blocked.

For other situations related to IP blocks, please contact Wiki Education staff. Include the usernames of affected students and the text and/or screenshots of any error messages encountered, if possible.

Most of the Dashboard's user interface is the same for instructors, students, and visitors who are not part of a course. The following key features are present only for specific roles.

Instructor-only features

• Real names of students are visible on the Students tab
• Editing of Course Details, Description, and Timeline
• Adding Available Articles; the link to the Available Articles view is not shown to students at all if the list is empty.
• Adding and removing students

Student-only features

• The Home tab includes Upcoming Exercises, which links to the next assigned Exercise module that has not yet been marked complete. (This is only present if the student has at least one incomplete exercise.)
• The Home tab include My Articles, which allows them to manage the articles they will write or peer review, and provides guidance on the key stages of the assignment for each article.

See the Keeping track of your work on the Dashboard training module for a walkthrough of these features.

There are several ways to manage which articles your students are assigned to peer review.

Randomly assign peer reviews

On the Students tab Overview, you (as the instructor) have the option to assign peer reviews randomly. This feature will use the number of peer reviews per student that you selected in the Assignment Wizard when you set up your course. It will attempt to assign peer reviews so that every assigned article has nearly the same number of reviewers, and each student has the designated number of articles to review.

Assign peer reviews manually

When you select an individual student fro the Students tab, you'll have the option to manage their assignments and peer reviews. Click 'Assign a peer review' to select a classmate's article to review, remove a previously selected review, or enter the title of another article to review.

Students choose peer reviews

Your students can manage their own peer reviews similarly to you. For students, this is done via the My Articles section of the Home tab.

Guiding questions

The 'Peer Review' link for each assigned peer review is a "preload" link that will load a set of guiding questions if the review hasn't been started yet. (This preload feature only works for users who are logged in on Wikipedia; if a student follows the link and reaches an empty page, they will need to sign in and try it again.)

Here are the preloaded guiding questions.

Finding completed peer reviews

Once a student has completed a peer review in the designated Wikipedia sandbox and saved it using the Publish button, you can view it via the 'Peer Review' link in the Students tab, Assignments & Exercises view.