The theme of education was pretty pervasive during this year conference. Despite of the myths that surround Wikipedia in popular culture, and the fears of high school and university teachers about the inaccuracy of the free encyclopedia, the joint effort of progressive educators around the world and the Wikimedia foundation has developed a solid and thriving Education Program. As a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador, my self, I enjoyed very much meeting other ambassadors and listen to their presentations. It was certainly powerful to learn about the rich learning experiences that educators are creating in universities and schools encouraging critical reading and editing of Wikipedia, verification of sources, translations of articles, and active contributions to the Commons with images, sounds, and videos.
In the attic of a beautiful old building (Sailor Foundation headquarters) in Georgetown, several educators and students got together on Friday and talked about our stories. Using classroom assignments such as papers to create new Wikipedia articles, translating entries from the English Wikipedia (the most extensive one) to Spanish, adding small edits (one sentence) to articles, and using only resources found in Wikipedia to write essays (criticizing the sources), were some of the examples that we shared during the Education Meet-Up. I was in particularly fascinated by the project created by Petr Broz from Wikimedia Czech Republic, who decided to create a visual memory game using images from the Commons in order to motivate students at his Charles University in Prague to take and donate pictures of their country animals, buildings, animals, plants, books, vehicles, etc.
The innovative educational practices developed by wikipedians are fostering not only the development of multiple literacies and critical pedagogies among students and teachers, but also the creation of open knowledge content available for free on the Internet. The rapid growth of the Wikipedia Educational Program and the multiple kind of projects that have spawned in different countries and across several institutions, are signs of the centrality of knowledge and learning in our contemporary societies. As more educators and students participate in these kind of initiatives and contribute to the growing and improvement of the free encyclopedia and the Commons, more readers and users benefit from their contributions.
Academic research on Wikipedia and other wikis has also expanded in many directions, generating a wide range of journal articles, theses, books, data-sets, and conference papers. From sociologists to computer scientists to humanists, scholars are studying the different practices and technical features of wiki platforms and communities. Some of the areas of research that have been explored by academics are related to gender participation, coverage of breaking news, quality of information, and readership. For instance, my friend Mako, delivered “Almost Wikipedia,” a very interesting talk based on the qualitative and quantitative research he has been doing on remixing communities and online collaboration. He presented some of his findings about why Wikipedia, as a peer production project, has been able to successfully attract contributors while most of the other projects have not. According to Mako’s research Wikipedia has attracted contributors because 1) it is about producing a familiar product (an encyclopedia); 2) it focused substantively on content, not on technology; 3) it lowered the transaction costs (little cost to edit); and 4) it hided authorship from editors. This final point fascinated me because it reminded me that the romantic notion of an individual, heroic, and publicized Author is certainly not appealing for developing successful peer production projects in the 21st century.
As an interesting meta-practice, a comprehensive WikiPapers has been devoted to compiling all the resources and works on research about wikis. Furthermore, the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, has also become a central site medium of communication for disseminating both the internal and external research about Wikipedia and its sister projects. I am definitely looking forward to writing a research paper about the Wikipedia myths in USA public high schools based on the ethnographic research I have been doing the last year for the Connected Learning Research Network.
