Create 2023/Faculty perspectives on the Wikipedia assignment: Submissions:2021/News On Wiki, Phase 2 complete

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2023.

Each term, Wiki Education supports hundreds of courses at post-secondary institutions in the U.S. and Canada. This amounts to thousands of students adding millions of words to English Wikipedia each year. Behind these courses are faculty who are committed to providing their students with a meaningful pedagogical experience while improving Wikipedia. Seldom though do the faculty we support and the Wikipedia editing community have opportunities to interact beyond Wikipedia.

In this panel, you'll hear from three longtime faculty in the Wikipedia Student Program. Helaine Blumenthal, Senior Program Manager at Wiki Education will introduce the session and provide an overview of the Student Program. Naniette Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Dept of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her students have contributed widely to the field of privacy. Sarah Turner is Associate Professor, Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University. Her students focus on topics related to environmental science. Cindi Tysic is Innovative, Pedagogy and Creative Spaces Librarian at the University at Buffalo. Her students have edited in a variety of fields with an emphasis on media literacy.

In this session, we'll explore the motivations behind running a Wikipedia assignment, the learning outcomes for students, the challenges of implementing the Wikipedia assignment, as well as the bigger impact of their student work on open education and information access. We'll discuss issues around knowledge equity and how faculty and students can play a critical role in tackling some of Wikipedia's ongoing content gaps. Attendees will gain new insights into the ways in which academia can support and enhance Wikipedia's goals and continued growth and success.