 We know that whether students are writing Wikipedia entries or whether they're creating open education resources for school teachers or for their peers on their course, we know that students respond incredibly positively to creating coursework that will actually live on in the real world and on the internet and that it won't just disappear into black hole once it's been marked. You're handed an essay, the only people who generally read it are you and you're natural. And then once they both read it, it gets kind of disappeared and you don't look at it again and then no one really benefits from it. But whereas with the Wikipedia assignment, like other people contribute to it, you put it out there for everyone to read, for everyone to gain knowledge from and you can keep coming back to it, keep editing, keep adding to it, other people can do as well and it kind of becomes more of a community project that everyone can read and access, which I really enjoyed and I was like, actually, yeah, it would be nice to have my work being appreciated and being read and being critiqued by other people other than just my lecturer. So that's probably kind of the main advantage for me about having this as part of my assignment. Yeah, I think it's a really cool project to have because it's collaborative, it's very, very real and I think it also explores some really, really important parts of research, such as practicing finding sources, researching a difficult topic, writing an article, thinking about planning and structuring, all that kind of thing, like the skills that anyone's going to need in university. But definitely for me, the best bit was that it was very real and that people were going to read it. I just treated it like a big essay for coursework. I think the other thing that was different was needing to get into the head of who would be reading it, on what they would want to know rather than just writing for a professor who was already an expert. So I suppose, because it was a disease, I figured it would either be researchers or patients or people who were worried about being diagnosed with this, so I kind of had bits about the mechanism, not just cellular origin but also things about treatment and prognosis and stuff. So yeah, I think that was how it looked just different. So here are just a few examples of the different types of Wikipedia pages that have been created or edited over the past few years as part of this course. And as you can see, there are a wide range of topics from the field of reproductive biology where students have come together and adds information to Wikipedia. So I asked a couple of the students for feedback on these tutorials and I have feedback here from Alex Mazalou, who is an interclating medical student, and Daisy Lentz, who was a reproductive biology honour student. So I will just play this feedback for you now. I think the Wikipedia tutorials are very useful in terms of learning how to reference a bit or just getting used to it more. I hadn't written too many essays at uni being a medic and so I wasn't too used to referencing but as you'll learn it's very important with Wikipedia to reference all the information that you're going to use. So finding sources and then citing them all is something that's a big part of it and I think just getting that little bit of practice in made it easier for me when it came to writing my dissertation and other essays. So I find the Wikipedia sessions really helpful. Certainly for me after a year of online learning I didn't know that many people in my class so being put into small groups of five or six and having to work together to make a Wikipedia page was a really nice way to meet others on my course as opposed to a more formal class such as a lecture or a tutorial. And being assigned a topic we didn't know that much about and having to research this and rewrite it in a way in which a non-scientist would understand is a skill that will be beneficial to many careers whether that is in academia or industry or medicine. It was also really interesting to see how Wikipedia works and how easy it is to make a Wikipedia page and I know that many people in the class, myself included have continued to create and edit Wikipedia pages since the session. Well it was a total revelation for me. I had never personally edited a Wikipedia page yet but I think the project really helped students to become directly involved in how internet education takes place. Wikipedia had been a wealth of content and something that students had referenced for a long time but it had always been assumed to be skewed by the knowledge of those who had the access to build on it and edit it directly. The first discussion we had in the project was pointing out the gaps in the information online. One of our goals was to bring in this case co-equal and Islamic art into the mainstream discussions of visual culture. Education is a privilege and access to robust and diverse information and images is vital to expanding that understanding. The Wikipedia project helped students to become disillusioned with this overarching internet scholarly authority but also feeling powered to strengthen those digital resources directly. Studying the variation in scholarship around certain subjects co-equal art in this case revealed this imbalance in the distribution of research and resources and how that impedes dynamic and intersectional conversations around visual culture. One of the themes for our project was understanding these scarcities online that exist but bringing co-equal art forward specifically through adding images. That was part of the easiest and most effective way that we could make these conversations more diverse and also elevate co-equal art in this case, particularly the Hilly Lee collection which we had access to. I found it to be a very empowering experience and one that was quite unexpected but to engage so closely with a tool that's so widespread was really fantastic. It remains a massive resource for people to access and understand history and yet the history that people access on Wikipedia is often very different from the history that you would access in a university department. There's very little social history, there's very little women's history and gender history, a history of women of people of colour or queer history and the only way that's going to be overcome is if people from those disciplines start actively engaging in Wikipedia and trying to correct those imbalances because I'm sure people are fascinated by what sort of bullet was used in X sort of gun but I feel the social potential of Wikipedia to change people's perspectives on the world really lies in correcting imbalances in their representation of the world and that's a very long sentence with many long words but basically what I'm trying to say is that people should try and make Wikipedia accurately represent the diversity of the world around us and the diversity of history and the diversity of historical scholarship. Sometimes when we learn about black history the transatlantic slave trade very much comes into the forefront and whilst obviously it's really really important that we broaden public knowledge and perception of the slave trade and things like abolition sometimes gets lost as the celebration of black achievements and black individuals who in their face of adversity were incredibly creative and accomplished so I think that's really important to build on that body of work in public perceptions of black history. The feedback we've had on this assessment it accounts for about 20% of their overall so they do 15% on the actual wiki updating and they do their own personal reflection on how they found the assessment so overall it takes up 20% of their goes towards 20% of their assessment so it's a fair chunk for a piece of group work and obviously they can then see a page that they've updated they know it will be used, it'll be referenced by other people who are looking for that information at later date and if they then wanted to go on update other pages that they've got those skills there as well which I think is really useful because a lot of them will be going into policy and working for NGOs and so forth so they might find that a really useful skill. We all know that our students are using Wikipedia and we're all using it ourselves so I think that being familiar with it is really important and it's a really important part of information literacy and digital skills and understanding of the resources that we and our students are using. I have used Wikipedia my whole life it seems ever since I was a student in high school and it's amazing. I have it as an app on my phone I use it a lot just for checking simple facts or looking up something or seeing when a movie was made whatever it is I seem to be able to find it on Wikipedia and so obviously the idea that I could actually do something a little bit translate an article from Spanish into English as I did and you know give a little bit back was really appealing to me I found it really I don't know I was passionate about it and it was also something that fulfilled me I guess in a way. Just this perfect opportunity I think to practice what we're learning but also to be able to use our knowledge to help and to add to something that we use so often I mean who doesn't use Wikipedia so I think it's a great opportunity to practice and to spread a little bit of knowledge around the world. Exercise in both like scientific writing and I suppose writing for a lay audience and like writing yeah concisely because you know the idea is you don't really have a word camp it needs to be a useful page you need to have the information readily available and you start thinking about even the order of the sub-sections of the article what would be the most useful order to have them in so it's a really good exercise in sort of reading your work from a fresh perspective I think it was really cool how I suppose inclusive it felt that I really didn't have to prove to anyone I could write before I did write and I really like that it's a concept just that anyone can contribute if they're enthusiastic. I think being able to explain something is always massively helpful I mean as a medic it's crucial it's a vital part of being a doctor being able to explain a patient's illness to them but also just everyday life I think it's really sort of integral into being able to hold a conversation so it's always useful to practice writing maybe really scientific in depth things in a more understandable way because yeah not only does it help other people to understand it but it also makes sure that you know it too and you can put it in a clear and concise manner. Attributed to public knowledge in some way even if it's just repackaging knowledge that's already there but you're making it accessible it's a really good exercise in critical thinking and that's something that sort of the ultimate skill you learn in an undergraduate degree and I was looking at it learning to look at an article and think how could this be improved and I think and then finally like as a student it's a really good opportunity and it's a really motivating thing to be able to do to relay the knowledge you've learnt from lectures and exams. It hasn't really been relevant outside of lectures and exams but to see how it's relevant to the real world and to see how you can contribute and use your knowledge to contribute I think what I found surprising was how easy it was like the visual editor was really good I thought I'd have to do a lot of like HTML coding or something but it was really easy to just put it in and do the references and stuff yeah and I suppose the other thing was how satisfying it was when it was done like I thought you know comparing again to academic essays like you send them off you get the grade back you look at the feedback and you really never really read them again whereas I suppose knowing that people are coming back to this article and finding it useful is really gratifying and you're just yeah I also do think that where then Wikipedia has a really good space is that academia focuses way too little on how to communicate you know world leading research to delamined people been great fun it's been a really rewarding experience and a way of engaging students in how to access and use databases how to abstract the information from those and how to use those to develop a web based resource so if you're thinking about it I would say definitely have a go