As an undergraduate, I heard the phrase, “No, you can’t use Internet sources for your paper,” many times. This made sense when the topic was Shakespeare or Mary Shelley, barring some major new finding that upends everything we once thought we knew. But when I was working on an independent study project about the Human Genome Project, I ran into a lot of trouble with that approach: the project was still ongoing, and a lot of print sources became out-of-date as updates were posted online daily.

The same issue again occured when I was teaching high school English. Books that had been written decades or centuries ago had plenty of proper print sources to explore (although when J.D. Salinger died, some new information suddenly came to light online). But when working with modern Urban Legends in Mythology (such as Slenderman), print sources did not always exist. Ditto when students wanted to write about modern pop media that referenced ancient mythology (such as the Percy Jackson books and movies, and many pop songs, tv shows, and cartoons).

Creating a Wikipedia or other wiki entry as an actual assignment

I thought it was interesting, then, that many of the readings for this week weren’t about consulting a wiki for sources, but creating a wiki yourself. I think the rule-of-thumb for using Wikipedia (or another wiki) for research or learning is now well known: use it as a starting point to find primary or authoritative/trustworthy sources (in the References section or elsewhere), not as an ending point. But the rules for creating a wiki are less well-known.

We’ve talked a lot about connections over the Internet mirroring neural pathways in the human brain. When we talk about a group creating a wiki, it’s easy to see a parallel to the different, often unconscious parts of the mind working to create consensus for the concious mind as well as for long-term memory storage. Cress and Kimmerle make this comparision explicit, observing, “For collective knowledge building with wikis, we state that accommodation and assimilation do not only take place internally (in people’s individual knowledge spaces) but also externally (in the wiki’s information space). A wiki can accommodate or assimilate as well.” An individual (a human mind) can accomodate and assimilate, and so can the wiki:

We apply this distinction between assimilation and accommodation to our model of people’s interaction with wikis described in our model. When interacting with the wiki, people can learn as a result of externalization, or as a result of internalization (with or without inferences). This learning can take place by assimilation or by accommodation respectively: people can acquire new information without changing their cognitive schemas, or they can modify schemas or create new schemas. – Cress and Kimmerle

Ruth Page observes a similar process while discussing a small learning group creating a wiki, noting, “Social constructivism was really put into practice where the knowledge that the group gained as a whole was jointly constructed through their contributions summarised on the wiki.” The idea of social constructivism has floated the notion of communities and whole societies as a giant “brain” before the Internet made this more obvious, and the pitfalls have been explored and discussed often. But I was interested in Page’s note on metacognition:

The students’ contributions to the wiki also led them to become much more reflective in their learning.  For example, students stated that the wiki gave them ‘A chance to review my own and other’s ideas from our class work that we tend to forget sometimes’ also encouraging a personally reflective stance, ‘It makes me go away after class and still think about the topic we did because I was using the wiki to type my ideas up’.  This was coupled with the opportunity for students to practice using the narratological concepts and to see how other students tackled the same problems but in different ways, ‘I have gained better understanding of the models covered in class and know how to apply these to texts.’   In summary, the wiki both consolidated the students’ knowledge of their subject but also amplified the beneficial group dynamics resulting in an overall deeper engagement with their learning.  One student put it this way: ‘the wiki has encouraged us to engage with each topic wholly instead of just leaving it until we came to do our assignments in December.’ – Page

If creating a wiki encourages self-reflection, it might encourage individuals to examine more closely their own logical fallacies and biases. Adrianne Wadewitz’s discussion on using Wikipedia as a teaching tool by actually having learners create pages for Wikipedia does observe that wikis are not free from bias:

She admitted, however, that “every edit is political,” because “you can’t put in every piece of information and you can’t use every source.” For example, her entry on the female rock climber Lynne Hill included a section about gender politics, and she arranged Hill’s story about being discriminated against with a whole section devoted to the topic, “because I study gender and think about it in this way.” Her entries on Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen “would have looked different” if generated by another scholar, but she asserted that her approach was actually more consistent with the Wikipedia philosophy governing men’s entries by going beyond biography to address the contributions made by these women’s work as writers. – Wadewitz

What Wikipedia is not discusses some frequently transgressed “don’ts,” explaining that Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion.” It is not for, “Advocacy, propaganda, or recruitment of any kind: commercial, political, scientific, religious, national, sports-related, or otherwise,” or for, “Advertising, marketing or public relations. Information about companies and products must be written in an objective and unbiased style, free of puffery.”

In spite of this last prohibition, for-profit Wikipedia editing does exist. Businesses and individuals offer Wikipedia-editing services, and companies, organizations, individuals, etc. have their own in-house Wikipedia editors. The fact that Wikipedia can correct biased information is a positive, but eliminating all conflicts of interest might be impossible. Creating unbiased knowledge is a constant work-in-progress, but may make people more aware of exactly how knowledge is constructed than previous methods, where the reader was often unable to view or participate in the editing process. Could this lead to less-biased knowledge than books have to offer?

Speaking of books: while looking at Wikibooks, I found an interesting book about Europe for students. I think the book is wonderful, but I wonder whether or not these books are too dry for today’s students. I would be interested to see metrics on real engagement.