Teaching examples

Examples at the University of Edinburgh of Wikipedia and teaching.

World Christianity MSc, University of Edinburgh 

Students each selected a topic to critically analyse and synthesised peer-reviewed literature to create new articles on Wikipedia in the field of World Christianity Studies. The assignment provided an opportunity for the students’ research to have a published output and increased the breadth and diversity of content online.

Wikipedia in the Classroom - interview with Dr. Alex Chow (World Christianity MSc)

Reproductive Biology BSc, University of Edinburgh

4th Year Reproductive Biology Honours BSc students researched and developed new Wikipedia articles on previously unpublished medical terms relating to their course content. This assignment has been repeated each year since 2015.

Impressively, students on this course created a new article on one of the most common and fatal forms of ovarian cancer which has now been viewed in excess of ninety thousand times since it was published in Sept 2016.

Translation Studies MSc, University of Edinburgh

A Wikipedia translation assignment was integrated into the Independent Study component of the MSc in Translation Studies, with students translating 1,500-2,000 words from a quality Wikipedia article and publishing to a different language Wikipedia in a wide variety of languages (Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish).

There are 20-50 new articles created in different language Wikipedias each semester. 

Design Informatics MA/MFA and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Data Project, University of Edinburgh

Design Informatics students on the Data Science for Design course were given the opportunity during the annual Data Fair project to work with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database. They imported data on Scotland’s accused witches and witch trials from this resource to Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, as 5-star linked open data to give a real-world practical example of analysing, manipulating, contextualising and visualising data in engaging ways.

Here is a link to the booklet for further examples.

Wikipedia for Learning and Teaching, Clare Thomson, Ulster University 

© Ewan McAndrew and Hannah Rothmann, University of Edinburgh, 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise indicated.