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WikiProjects, Article Importance, and Article Quality: An Intimate Relationship (1/2)
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] In a previous post, I wrote about how WikiProject Medicine acts as a forum for determining the priority (also called importance) of specific health-related Wikipedia articles and assessing their quality (also called class). More generally, these three concepts—WikiProjects, article importance, and article quality—are crucial for instructors and students to understand if they seek to use course-based assignments to improve Wikipedia. I will address each of them in turn. WikiProjects A WikiProject comprises a group of collaborators who aim to achieve specific Wikipedia editing goals, or to achieve goals in a specific subject or discipline represented in Wikipedia. An example of an editing type of project is…
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Wikipedia’s Gender Bias – and What Your Students Can Do About It
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] Every system has its biases, and Wikipedia is no exception. A common criticism of Wikipedia is its male bias. Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agreed with the criticism after it conducted a 2011 survey indicating that up to 90% of editors identified as male. This is a problem for a non-profit organization whose mission is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content … and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” The mechanisms for the gender bias are various, complex, and the subject of several studies, recently summarized by two New York researchers. They may include the code-heavy interface, called…
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Teaching the Language of our Disciplines
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Bolded words (those terms highlighted in textbooks), matter for they are the building blocks of every language that allow us to communicate complex ideas, convey how we see the world and shape our questions and ways of engaging with the world to answer our questions. But words, those collected sets of sounds, do not form a language. The relationships (syntax) and the underlying meetings & ideas (semantics) are necessary for fluency. We see this in students’ work where the keywords are there, but applied incorrectly or are erratically irrelevant. They may start a sentence with one theorists premise and end it with another’s conclusion…