[Okfn-dk] En mulig ide til vores møde tirsdag ?

[Ove Larsen]

*Kan DK universiteter påvirkes til at gøre det til en del af deres
undervisning ?*

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/science-students-are-writing-wikipedia-articles-instead-of-term-papers
Science Students Are Writing Wikipedia Articles Instead of Term Papers
Written by Meghan Neal contributing editor

*Do scientists and educators have a public responsibility to help make
Wikipedia articles accurate? It’s a fascinating question, especially when
you consider the sheer power Wikipedia has over how people learn
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539001/why-wikipedia-open-access-revolution/>
about the world: Some 8,000 people view the site every second,* and it’s
almost always a top link result when we Google something we want to know.

*That question is at the heart of a clever program
<https://wikiedu.org/yearofscience/> that has university students, overseen
by professors, create and edit Wikipedia articles instead of writing term
papers to demonstrate their comprehension of a subject. *

The idea is pretty genius in its simplicity: Students develop writing
skills and critical thinking while the crowdsourced encyclopedia gets a
booster shot of academic knowledge to fill in some of the gaps. This year
the focus is on science <https://wikiedu.org/yearofscience/>—and
specifically, women in science.

An independent nonprofit called the Wiki Education Foundation
<https://wikiedu.org/> (not connected to the Wikimedia Foundation) has been
shepherding the program for about three years now. *About 200 schools have
incorporated editing Wikipedia into their curriculum, including UC
Berkeley, Harvard, Duke, George Washington and New York University.*
Students have worked on around 35,000 articles that have accumulated 78
million views so far, Wiki Ed’s communications manager Eryk Salvaggio told
me.

The “Year of Science <https://wikiedu.org/yearofscience/>” project will try
to improve how Wikipedia informs the public about science, including honing
in on the fact that women are notoriously underrepresented on Wikipedia
<http://motherboard.vice.com/en_au/read/editing-sexism-out-of-wikipedia>.
There's a notable absence of women scientists
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mission-to-get-women-scientists-on-wikipedia>
on the site, and not just because it reflects historic cultural sexism;
activists found that thousands of female scientists, including many
prominent ones, had no Wikipedia page, while many obscure male scientists
had a presence on the site.

The site’s gender bias points to an interesting side effect of the
crowdsourced model. Because there’s no central authority that “owns” the
information on the site, the online encyclopedia only reflects topics that
volunteer contributors find interesting, creating a systemic discrimination
<http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/wikipedia-cant-escape-its-gender-problem>.


When the majority of Wikipedia editors are white men from developed
countries (about just 8-14 percent of editors are women), diverse
perspectives are missing
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-content-is-mostly-generated-from-economic-hubs>,
which seriously skews how the Wiki generation is learning about the world.

WiKi Ed is trying to correct that imbalance; this past term students
contributed about 500 articles about women and topics related to women’s
studies, said Salvaggio.

The program is also grappling with the question of Wikipedia’s reliability
and how that impacts how people learn about science—which, frankly, scares
me on a regular basis. Studies looking into the accuracy of Wikipedia
articles <http://motherboard.vice.com/read/in-defense-of-wikipedia> had
somewhat mixed results, but generally found that the the information on the
site is more reliable than you might *think*, but there are huge gaps in
what’s covered and plenty of straight-up inaccuracies.

The ethos of the Wiki Ed project is, you can either bemoan that fact, or
accept it as reality and work to make the prominent encyclopedia better.
“If it isn’t presenting the information you think it should be presenting,
or you don’t think the information’s accurate—fix it,” said Salvaggio.

But that will require academia to stop writing Wikipedia off as an
illegitimate source and recognize that it’s probably here to stay, so might
as well get in the game and help improve it. “You can’t ignore the fact
that, for better or worse, this is the front page of the internet for
people to find out detailed information about things,” said Greg Boustead,
an education program manager at the Simons Foundation, which is helping
support the Wiki Ed project, along with a funding boost from Google.

“It almost seems like a hugely irresponsible thing to ignore the largest
place for information where everyone goes to learn about science"

Wiki Ed is trying to convince scientists and educators to wield the
Wikipedia firehose. Scientists, Boustead said, are already writing
abstracts and speaking at conferences about their topics of research, but
often overlooking this powerful outlet to get that information to the
public. “It almost seems like a hugely irresponsible thing to ignore the
largest place for information where everyone goes to learn about science—to
not include your expertise.”

Which raises an interesting question when it comes to bias, another
controversial spot for Wikipedia: Is there a difference between experts and
educators versus corporate shills when a group comes together to engineer
the encyclopedia’s content?

Neutrality is a sticky issue, and one the Wikipedia editing community is
quite strict about, especially after hundreds of brands were caught
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-wikipedia-editors-got-banned-for-secretly-promoting-brands>
using the site as a promotional platform. One-sided information is often
flagged, and per the site’s policy, scientists can’t write about their own
research without disclosing a conflict of interest on a Wikipedia talk page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages>.

Wiki Ed also isn’t the only example of a group of people with a shared
expertise self-organizing to beef up a topic’s presence on the site. There
are dozens of task forces, called “WikiProjects
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory>,” including
a one focused on recognizing women in science.
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/11/emily-temple-wood-profile/> These
groups help identify content holes that can be helpful as a starting point
for student assignments—often esoteric or highly technical topics that are
too difficult for most people to broach, or subjects that aren’t touched on
organically by volunteers.

The group will also be hitting the science conference
<http://meetings.aaas.org/wikipedia/> circuit this year, including a stop
at the White House, to promote the project to the academic community and
continue the tradition of holding edit-a-thons focused on issues like
gender diversity.

Professors are often skeptical about the idea, but what tends to strike a
chord is that the assignment forces students to take a critical look at how
to consume the information on the web. What is a reliable source? What
biases are behind the content? Is it accurate and balanced?

“They’re also just thinking about *how* to read things they find on the
internet,” said Salvaggio. Which is something we could probably all stand
to get better at.
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