adopting a premade, rather than creating a tailored, scaffolded training structure. Finally, students in fall 2019 were asked to write letters to the next semester’s students to give them advice. This helped reinforce that they were part of an ongoing community, but also these notes helped ease students’ anxieties about their contributions. Students in spring 2020 wrote similar letters to the next semester’s students, but also some wrote to the fall 2019 students thanking them for their advice. This practice continued in fall 2020 as it has proven successful.
Conclusion
On the final day of class for fall 2019/spring 2020/fall 2020, De Voe visited the classes not to “give the library talk” (Eisenhower & Smith, 2009, p. 319) but to discuss her own perspectives on editing Wikipedia as both a librarian and scholar. This culminating moment reminded students that, by editing Wikipedia, they engaged in a scholarly project that reached beyond the bounds of the semester. The students enjoyed hearing someone else place their own experiences using Wikipedia in context. This was followed by a discussion of a reading on how to rebuild academics’ trust of Wikipedia (Jemielniak & Aibar, 2016). Students connected their work as part of that broader mission. One student wrote, “I appreciated how Kristina De Voe described Wikipedia as more of an entry point into a subject, as opposed to the ultimate authority on it. If the cultural understanding and expectations of Wikipedia change, as they have for me, perhaps it will become more broadly accepted in academia and positively regarded in popular culture.” Similarly, students found that they only really understood how Wikipedia works by actively engaging with it: “It was not until actively participating in the Wikipedia process, that I began to understand who is contributing, how they are going about doing it, and why.”
Over the course of four semesters, and two different courses, 98 students have added approximately 73,000 words, 680 references, and 51 commons uploads while editing 56 articles and creating 7 new ones. These edits, as of December 2020, had been viewed 7.5 million times. Adding Wikipedia to these courses served multiple pedagogical
