Idea 12: Practicing Writing to a General Audience through Wikipedia

Instructions

• Have students pick a topic to research.  Be sure to keep them related to the class curriculum.
• Wikipedia pages typically follow a general structure.  Have students look at similar topics to their own, and write a general outline of information to include.
• Give students time to research the information, or assign it as homework. 
• Once students have finished finding the content (and saved their citations), they can post it to the web.

Best Practices

• Early drafts may be in too technical of language depending on subject.  Revisions are key to making them Wikipedia-friendly.
• It can be advantageous to leave a note in the ‘Talk’ section of the pages to let others know what you’re doing.
• Instead of giving students free-reign to pick a topic, it is best to give them several options based off of what is missing from Wikipedia, overall importance, or relation to the course content.

Advantages

• Students get significant amounts of experience communicating their subject to a layperson.
• The final product is made public, raising student motivation to do well.
• Students are given influence over what topics that they research.

Adapted from:

McNeill, A. (2012). Editing Wikipedia to Improve Writing to a General Audience. Retrieved from: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/node/641

 

Note: The Canvas LMS at WWU supports course wikis, but these cannot be made public.

 

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