new articles for authors read in the course. Despite discussions emphasizing that this was more complex than editing existing articles, students still thought it would be easier. These students ran into problems finding reliable sources to cite (beyond faculty bios on university websites). We identified that this largely stemmed from students being unfamiliar with sources like academic book reviews, which facilitate scholarship as conversation (Rowland et al., 2019). Thus, in spring 2020, short academic book reviews were assigned to be read alongside the selections from academic books assigned in the course. This addition helped put academic conversations in context but also helped students realize what other sorts of information would be useful in creating articles about scholars. Rather than shy away from having students create new articles, the iterative process simply showed what skill sets and knowledge practices students would need before tackling such projects. Indeed, one student in fall 2020 created a new article for a scholar that has thus far met Wikipedia’s notability standards. The article was shared with the scholar, who then immediately shared it with her entirely family, much to the delight of the student who had worked so hard on it.
In addition, one student in fall 2019 expressed concern that they did not feel comfortable making contributions to Wikipedia because they weren’t an “expert” on the topic. We now know it was important to emphasize that students need not be subject matter experts to identify flaws with existing articles and restructured some of the training activities to emphasize this. The WikiEdu trainings were reorganized for spring 2020 so that students identified the article they were going to edit/create earlier in the semester. For students contributing to existing articles, they did an evaluation exercise, identifying the changes they would make before finalizing that choice. Students creating new articles analyzed similar existing articles, identifying what they would need to do to make a good one. Then each of the weekly trainings and exercises required them to work on the articles they had chosen (e.g., learning to add citations by adding content and a citation to their sandbox for their article). This required reworking the default training timeline offered by WikiEdu and indeed showed some of the limitations of relying on
