An overview of Wikipedia and it's role in higher education. Exploring the intersection of the world's largest reference work and academia

1. The Future of Wikipedia
in Education
Jake Orlowitz
User:Ocaasi
jorlowitz@gmail.com
@JakeOrlowitz
Wikimedia Foundation Grantee
Wiki Project Med Foundation
Wikipedia Administrator
All content under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

2. An early study in the journal Nature said that in 2005,
Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of
accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar
rate of "serious errors".[2]
Between 2008 and 2012, articles in medical and scientific
fields such as pathology,[5] toxicology,[6] oncology,[7]
pharmaceuticals,[8] and psychiatry[9] comparing Wikipedia
to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that
Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high
standard.
--Reliability of Wikipedia, Wikipedia

3. Ubiquitous usage
● 50% to 90% of physicians
● 35 to 70% of pharmacists
● 94% of medical students use Wikipedia

4. Wikipedia’s scale
30m articles, 4m English
16 million images
8000 views per second
500 million unique visitors per month
3.7 billion monthly mobile pageviews
2.1 billion edits, 700 million English

5. Wikipedia’s mission
Imagine a world in which every person on
the planet shares in the sum of all human
knowledge. That is what we’re doing.
(for free, in the language of their choice)

6. Wikipedia’s volunteers
20 million registered users
120,000 active editors
1,400 administrators
… working for free, with no central control

7. Wikimedia’s scope
286 languages
18 projects
images, data, dictionary, travel guide,
species, quotes, books, source material, wiki
software...

8. Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco
150 employees
Donor funded
Nonprofit
No ads!

9. Wikipedia’s pillars
Neutral point of view
Verifiability
Consensus
Civility
Open copyright

12. Wikipedia’s reliability
As accurate as Britannica
Errors fixed quickly over time
“Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow”
Virtual filter
Teaches information literacy

13. Multiple safeguards
1. Edit Filter automatically rejects known vandalism patterns
2. ClueBot reverts and flags suspicious edits with a machine-learning bot
3. Humans review malicious changes tagged with language recognition tools
4. Vandalism patterns are checked against metadata and historical trends
5. Recent changes patrollers scroll through new edits
6. Editors alerted to each change on all pages in their article watchlist
7. Specialists and experts report and fix mistakes when they see them
8. Millions of readers identify and correct errors when they come upon them
9. Link blacklists lock out known spam sites and unreliable sources
10. Detection mechanisms to determine conflict of interest
11. Administrators to block disruptive editors and protect pages

14. Featured, Good articles
Semi-formal peer review
Total: 4,000 FAs and 10,000 GAs
Frequently written by experts
Primarily by one or by a few people
[20]

15. Pedagogical Benefit
● Engaged students, global audience, realworld purpose
● Unique assignment, peer feedback, cool and different
● Media literacy, identify bias, evaluate credibility
● Constructing knowledge, content gaps
● Discourse, collaboration, community of practice
● Expository writing, literature review, citation
● Critical thinking, process reflection
● Plagiarism, close paraphrasing, copyright
● Digital citizenship, online etiquette, wiki code

16. Plagiarism

20. Education Program
Started with 2010 Public Policy Initiative
20,000 printed pages
6,000 Wikipedia articles
Mission Alignment:
Increasing participation
Increasing quality

28. Questions?
jorlowitz@gmail.com
education@wikimedia.org