Wikipedia Assignments for Academic English Courses in Hong Kong

Abstract

Although Wikipedia has a bad reputation when used as an academic source, it has a number of advantages when used as an academic writing assignment, since it is similar to conducting a literature review. These advantages include contributing to solving a real world problem by writing on topics that are missing, underrepresented or inaccurate on Wikipedia. Students also have a ‘real’ audience for their writing outside the classroom and are held accountable to an online community of writers with their own stringent standards. They also need to use transferable academic skills such as searching for sources, critical reading, paraphrasing, citation and referencing, awareness of register and audience, communicating an unbiased or balanced view and maintaining high standards of academic English. We introduced a wiki assignment for the first time in an academic English course for biomedical sciences students. In this workshop we will show you how to use the Wikipedia outreach dashboard, facilitate electronic student feedback on each other’s work, and assess of wiki articles. We will also include student’s feedback on their experience of writing a wiki article assignment for our course and any difficulties or pitfalls that we experienced during the process which we have tips for overcoming.