Media Contact
Amanda Head
Manager, Marketing and Public Relations
College of Arts & Sciences
[email protected]
ATLANTA—When students enrolled in Global Studies Institute Associate Professor Jennie Burnet’s Culture and Change in Africa course last spring, they had no idea that they’d spend the semester generating high quality contributions to a platform many of their former professors deemed unreliable: Wikipedia.
Months later, the students’ Wikipedia content has become part of the corpus of knowledge on Wikipedia, with more than one million page views.
“While I know that professors often tell students that Wikipedia is not good for their research, I take a different approach,” said Burnet. “I tell students to be savvy users of the source, selecting pages that are well-searched, well-written and well-edited and bypassing pages with unsourced information, unedited information and propaganda.”
Africa has been highlighted as an area not well-documented on the online encyclopedia. Considering her course covered the continent’s historical and cultural changes, Burnet thought the Wikipedia project would be a great hands-on opportunity for her students to produce better content for the online encyclopedia on Africa.
She partnered with the Wikipedia Education Foundation on the project. Wiki Education enlists the help of students and academics to improve Wikipedia content and create a more enriched learning experience for Wikipedia users.
The students worked in teams and used online tutorials provided by Wiki Education to learn how to edit and evaluate information.
“The Wiki project was very eye-opening,” said Global Studies junior Hannah Anderson. “Most of the students who took the course agreed that we tend to avoid Wikipedia when doing research because our teachers and professors have always preached about the unreliableness of it. However, after doing this project, we all learned how to use Wikipedia properly and how to help add accurate information.”
Burnet hopes that projects like this one quell the notion that Wikipedia is entirely bad. Her advice to students conducting research: “Wikipedia is not a place to end your research but a place to begin it.”
To learn more about the Wikipedia Education Foundation, please click here.