individual plagiarism checks using a tool called Earwig, which assesses Wikipedia articles for copyright violations, as well as the plagiarism tool, Urkund, in the learning management system (LMS) Brightspace. Throughout this process, students had exemplars, in the form of full articles, which were published in Wikipedia, as well as support from people in the Wikipedia community who could answer questions and note points that required further editing attention.
Learning culminated in an end-of-course Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, an editing workshop during class, bringing all instructors and students together. The Wikipedian also ran mini advanced lessons, such as adding visual content to articles, during the edit-a-thon. The edit-a-thon provided students an opportunity to ask residual questions, offer peers feedback, and to wrap up their work. Having experienced collaborative authorship firsthand, students then wrote a reflection about their learning over the course, detailing their application of learning in Wikipedia and relating this learning to plans for future learning and the workplace. This reflective piece was significant for helping students review and deepen their learning around literacy skills further.
(2) Using Wikipedia to teach critical thinking and academic integrity—a librarian’s perspective
Critical thinking and academic integrity are foundational skills undergraduate students must develop in order to succeed at university and later in their working careers (Shavelson et al., 2019; Tremblay et al., 2012). Yet librarians often find themselves teaching these skills in a vacuum: a lecturer calls them into their classroom to “do the library session” without explicitly integrating the session’s learning outcomes into the wider module. Such one-shot sessions often fail to provide students with the information and digital literacy skills they require for academic success and responsible citizenship (Mays, 2016). In contrast, by introducing critical thinking and academic integrity in the context of collaborative authorship for a Wikipedia entry, students are no longer expected to develop these skills in the abstract: they become active researchers involved in a scholarly conversation with their peers, develop critical thinking skills while evaluating the quality of
