Wikipedia in higher education? it’s legitimate, and I proved it long ago

The Wikimedia Foundation announced in May 2010 that it had received a grant to facilitate involvement of American universities in the goal of improving public policy articles. Throughout the summer, they obtained the support of nine professors from five universities and have hired staff, held trainings and connected with students and professionals at each school—they’re ready to make this pilot program a reality.

I’ve heard the same issues about Wikipedia that everybody seems familiar with (“not a valid source,” etc.), but, in 2007, I conducted a project very similar to the current program and proved the skeptics wrong.

Background

I attended Oregon State University from 2003 to 2008 and wrote my undergraduate thesis under guidance of Associate Professor Andrea Marks. It was an amazing adventure. My written thesis demonstrated three key points…

1. The common American public education model had grown from several cultural and technological revolutions^[6][7]
2. The effectiveness and equality of American public education has suffered during the cultural and technological progress of the 1980s and 1990s^{[figure 1][18][19]}
3. The shift in cultural norms that have come with the Millennial Generation and the advancement of technology that has related to the Web 2.0 movement should be embraced and integrated into instructional models to improve education (but be bold and do it correctly)^{[28][32][34][37]}

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture arguments are well summarized by his 2006 lecture, “The Withering Of The Net” < http://www.archive.org/details/igovernance_rawfootage_l2a >

My favorite part of the thesis was an adventure in which I expressed my frustrations and then showed the legitimacy of our new techno-cultural frontier. I cited Wikipedia (using the proper URLs), YouTube^[40], television news^[35] and dramas^[14], a public email list^[34] and various lectures from distinguished academics^[27][39][41]. It felt good to supplant the cultural symbols of my contemporaries into the academic rigor of an accredited, four-year professional degree program; it felt good to write out my thoughts; and it felt great to get full credit for my thesis and graduate with cum laude honors.

Proof of concept

After writing the thesis, I was required to perform three projects that proved or explored its findings and arguments. For one of the projects, I contributed to the Wikimedia Foundation’s various projects and explored their collaborative merits and cultural functions. In total, I have logged 3189 edits since April 14, 2007.

I told my classmates how to use wikis, how to evaluate Wikipedia’s articles for accuracy and completeness (follow through on those references!), and how to take important terms from articles and references and find scholarly books and articles in the amazing databases of our university.

I participated in mild edit wars on contentious articles and silly nitpicks over the appropriateness of “slaughter” versus “kill,” when used to describe humans.

The Secret Service watches your Wikimedia contributions

I combed through my previous years of illustrations, photographs, scans and saved photos and released a lot of my work into the public domain. I worked for the library at the time and went rogue (like Carl Malamud) to “free” many high-resolution public domain images from the university’s archives. I even caught the ire (OTRS #2007110910016335) of the US Secret Service by uploading 24 megapixel scans of the US Dollar in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills (they’re public domain!).

Since my thesis, I have fully reorganized the categories relating to printing technologies, written a few articles about new construction in Portland, Oregon, corrected various typos, and contributed many sources and statements to articles that interest me.

Reflection

I interacted with two people holding doctorates, a notoriously mysterious contributor, several users who ended up banned (one directly by Jimmy Wales, himself!), and various unknown-to-me usernames and IP addresses. The work was at the hours and pace that fit my schedule (although, there was a lot of pressure to meet course deadlines), and from the comfort of my own office in the urban apartment I shared with three other students.

Throughout my interactions with the Wikimedia Foundation, I have learned that Wikipedia and the cultural commons are only as good as we make them—and they are generally pretty darn amazing. My goal was to push the boundaries of my university, the roles of Wikipedia and the legitimacy of my generation’s norms. I found that my writing skills greatly improved as I synthesized texts together to form sophisticated articles. My reading comprehension skills grew by leaps and bounds after pouring through several hundred books, thousands of journal articles and dozens of web projects.

Lastly, I found the courage to stand up to the Old Garde and let them know that the internet and its collaborative technologies are transforming the world—whether or not they join us in this new frontier.