Page values for "Submissions:2024/ChatGPT and Wikipedia Plugin: Did it increase quality in student writing?"

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, shifting its most popular generative AI engine into a chat format. Even before the release of ChatGPT, faculty at the University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric were engaging generative AI tools. Students were introduced to AI tools and given the opportunity to use them to identify sources, understand counterarguments, or revise their writing for improved voice. And each time students engaged with a generative AI tool, they were given space to reflect on the experience. In some cases, students found generative AI helpful, and in other cases, they found it distracting. However, one key issue that students and faculty agreed upon about the use of generative AI for academic writing was that as long as AI outputs could not be linked to reliable sources, their value would be limited. With the rollout of ChatGPT 4.0, OpenAI created plugins. In July 2023 the Wikimedia Foundation sponsored the creation of the Wikipedia plugin for ChatGPT. Although that tool has now been deprecated, it operated from roughly July-November 2023. When entries were made into ChatGPT with the Wikipedia plugin, responses were generated with a link back to relevant Wikipedia pages. With this explicit connection between generative AI output and the world’s largest encyclopedia, would students find this next version of ChatGPT more factual for use in academic projects? We present the results of a fall 2023 semester study engaging ChatGPT with Wikipedia plugin. Looking at 111 argument essays written in first-year composition classrooms at an R1 university in the United States, we have examined the sources cited by student writers to answer these research questions: Does college classroom writing produced using ChaptGPT with Wikipedia plugin engage more external sources than writing produced without the plugin? Are those cited sources of higher quality? And does the use of ChatGPT with Wikipedia plugin help writers with source integration?

Portions of this paper have been presented at the University of Mississippi, but the entire paper has not yet been presented in its entirety.

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