Some Colleges Cautiously Embrace Wikipedia

LiAnna Davis remembers when people didn’t want to talk to her at academic conferences:

“I had this woman one time who held her folder up over her head and was like, ‘Don’t let my department chair see me talking to you guys, but I’m so glad you’re here.’”

Davis works for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that was once considered anathema to the academic mission. She’s director of programs for its higher-education-focused nonprofit arm, Wiki Education.

Academics have traditionally distrusted Wikipedia, citing the inaccuracies that arise from its communally edited design and lamenting students’ tendency to sometimes plagiarize assignments from it.

Now, Davis said, higher education and Wikipedia don’t seem like such strange bedfellows. At conferences these days, “everyone’s like, ‘Oh, Wikipedia, of course you guys are here.’”

“I think it’s a recognition that Wikipedia is embedded within the fabric of learning now,” she said.

One initiative Davis oversees at Wiki Education aims to forge stronger bonds between Wikipedia and higher education. The Visiting Scholars program, which began in 2015, pairs academics at colleges with experienced Wikipedia editors.

Institutions provide the editors with access to academic journals, research databases, and digital collections, which the editors use to write and expand Wikipedia articles on topics of mutual interest. A dozen institutions, including Rutgers University, Brown University, and the University of Pittsburgh, are participating.

But while feedback from the participating institutions has been positive, Davis said, some are still skeptical of Wikipedia’s presence in academe.

‘Shorthand’ Scapegoat

Carolyn Caffrey Gardner, information-literacy coordinator and a librarian at California State University-Dominguez Hills, said Wikipedia is often generalized as a “shorthand for an uncredible resource.” When professors want students to use scholarly resources, she said, they tell their students not to use Wikipedia.

The website has become a scapegoat for scholars, she said. But its accessibility makes it alluring to students.

“If you tell students, ‘You can’t use this,’ and yet it’s very helpful for them and they find it coherently provides an overview of a complex topic at a level that they feel they can really understand and grasp,” Gardner said, “it kind of makes sense why there would be a lot of overlap in the language and the words used on Wikipedia and in student papers.”

Scholars’ skepticism about Wikipedia also stems from its community-authorship model, said Amanda Rust, a digital-humanities librarian at Northeastern University. Not all academics felt that way about Wikipedia in its fledgling days, but a critical mass perceived the online encyclopedia as a threat, Rust said.

As Wikipedia has matured, however, that consensus began to shift.

And students’ widespread use of Wikipedia has forced some cynics to acknowledge its role in higher education. “Whether or not you think a crowdsourced encyclopedia can work, that ship has sailed, and students are using it all the time,” Rust said.

Unlikely Partnership?

Rust has embraced the complexities of the connection between academe and Wikipedia by serving as Northeastern’s liaison in the Visiting Scholars program.

She works with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, an editor who was named a co-Wikipedian of the Year in 2016 and whose specialty is women writers — including novelists, journalists, editors, publishers, and art critics — before the 20th century. Her research dovetails with that of Northeastern’s Women Writers Project, so Davis paired the two.

Four months into their partnership — which they plan to continue indefinitely — Stephenson-Goodknight said having access to the Northeastern libraries’ online databases has made her feel “like a kid in a candy store.”

Access to the university’s resources, she said, can mean the difference between a short “stub” article on Wikipedia and a more exhaustive page. Since starting as a Visiting Scholar, she said, she has written 231 articles on Wikipedia and edited 334 more.

And by opening its archives to Stephenson-Goodknight, Rust said, Northeastern is making history more accessible, a mission she said is shared by Wikipedia.

“If the goal of Wikipedia is to create the largest, most reliable free encyclopedia for everyone in their own language, that shows a stance towards not only the sharing of knowledge but also the belief that humans want knowledge and humans want to learn,” Rust said. “That, to me, is what educational institutions also believe.”

Royce Kimmons, an assistant professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, said Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing has been key to its growth.

“The reason that Wikipedia has become what it has become,” he said, “is because of its unique approach to knowledge creation and sharing and how it has valued laypeople as potential knowledge sources.”

But that authorship model raises a question of credentialing for people like him.

“If I see something that I think is wrong on Wikipedia and I go and try to edit it,” Kimmons said, “I don’t necessarily have any more clout than the 12-year-old kid down the street who is trying to edit the same thing.”

What should academics’ role be on Wikipedia? Higher education and the online encyclopedia, Kimmons said, are still trying to figure that out.

“On some level, the academic in me feels like there should be some role for the expert in Wikipedia,” he said. “But in the same way, we’re where we’re at with Wikipedia today because in some ways, we have not relied upon traditional measures of expertise.”

Some of academe’s initial apprehension toward Wikipedia arose because it was a new, unknown quantity, competing against far more established sources.

“If something was published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we tended to accept that as true,” Kimmons said. “We didn’t go and fact-check the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

But Wikipedia has forced academics to re-examine how they validate sources, he said. “We should have been doing that all along. We should have been approaching an Encyclopaedia Britannica article with a certain level of distrust and questioning: What are the biases of people writing this? What are they leaving out? What communities are not included in this conversation? Just the newness of the approach of Wikipedia forced us to adopt a certain level of distrust, which I think is healthy in any academic quest for answers.”

A Catch That Lends Credence

The key to appreciating Wikipedia as an academic is recognizing its shortcomings, Kimmons continued. “No one believes that Wikipedia is the gospel truth. Everyone recognizes where the stuff on Wikipedia comes from. It’s community-generated. It can be flawed. It can be problematic.”

But while Wikipedia’s key characteristic — anyone can edit it — may result in some inaccuracies, it also lends the site some credence, Kimmons said.

“If I go and read a Wikipedia article on a controversial topic, because it’s gone through the wringer of the community, it tends to have a lot of complex richness to it. If not true in a capital-T sense, it at least reflects a lot of the nuances and ambiguities and controversies in the community related to the topic.”

In the meantime, people like Stephenson-Goodknight are working to make Wikipedia a richer resource.

“Everywhere where there’s a university,” she said, “there’s room for something like this, for someone to be a Visiting Scholar and do exactly the kind of work that I’m doing.”

Follow Megan Zahneis on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.