How may we teach students to use Wikipedia in an efficient

way?

CHRISTOPHE PREMAT(Pedagogisk ambassadör - 2018)

Romanska och klassiska institutionen

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Source for the images● https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michel_Serres_

-_Espace_des_sciences_-_15-02-2011.JPG (Retrieved on 21 January 2018) (First picture)

● https://www.editions-lepommier.fr/petite-poucette#anchor2 (Retrieved on 21 January 2018) (Second Picture)

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Who is Poucette?● Serres M. (2012). Petite Poucette. Paris: Le Pommier.

● Poucette is a digital native, she/he does not need to make so many efforts to have access to information

● Poucette is impatient, she/he does not necessarily analyze the information (the sources) she/he gets

● She/he can copyedit / paste information but needs help to use the sources. ✄✄✄✍✍

● She/he can sometimes suspected of plagiarism. She/he needs to know what is true/false (Karl Popper/ falsifiability)

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Background● Difficulties for students to produce an academic text

(standard), it is even more difficult to do that in a foreignlanguage

● Too much information on the net and difficulties to produce a personal text

● Students use ”google-translate”● They paraphrase without reporting the source, they go

through Wikipedia

● They do not know what it means to think critically

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Plagiarism

● Plagiarism: stealing the others´ production● It breaks scientific trust● It has juridical consequences● It is a question of ethics as it is easier

nowadays to act as a plagiator with the available information on Internet

● Plagiarism is a consequence of scientificmisuse (pedagogical problem). How do I use resources in an appropriate way to avoid plagiarism?

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Case-study: the relation between Wikipediaand scientific knowledge

● Analyzing the sources is necessary. Wikipedia is a strong platform

guided by a community of anonymous users (Hoeres, 2015: 18)

(horizontal and sharing governance) Non profit organization

(different from YouTube). The content will always be available

● Wikipedia was created in 2001 by people working with free

softwares. Empowerment of local communities (idealistic narrative,

Lund 2017)

● Creative Common Licence (the content can be used as much as

possible without paying any fees…). Pedagogical problem: how to

guarantee a quotation principle which is fundamental in the

academic world (Tkacz, 2015)

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Using Wikipedia in class as a possible and concrete pedagogical resource

● It might be interesting to select short notices that could be reused in other contexts. A

good wikipedia notice that indicates different sources is a material. Difficulty for the

teacher: the text can be updated at any time, but the teacher can take part in the

sharing process.

● Some international students can compare the text in the mother tongue (available

resources)

● The teacher can have a discussion on the validity of the Wikipedia texts that can be

compared with other sources.

● Wikipedia is a path, it is a learning tool and could be completed depending on the level

of the course and the expected study resultat.

● Sometimes, it can be possible to design specific Wikipedia exercices (Source criticism…)

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Blooms taxonomi (1956)

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Is Wikipedia a real open knowledgecommunity?

● The analysis of the content can be interesting (rhetorics..). Can we

help students to identify scientific information from ideological

promotion? (bargaining system?) (O´Sullivan 2009)

● Some scientific debates could be presented as big controversies.

How can we face that problem? (risk for fake news)

● Anonymous writers / copyright (Burke, 2012)

● What kind of interference with the open world? (Can we guarantee

that students can have access to knowledge without being

influenced too much?)

● Need to calibrate the information (the pedagogical role is here)

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Wiki sources: conclusions● Necessity to present source criticism in the relation between Wikipedia

and Academic discourse.

● A difference between the Wikipedia community / Academic community

● A learning tool that needs to be calibrated (struggle agains fake news).

● An instrument to increase the relation to the society and the students´

influence (increasing the feedback, Hattie, Timperley, 2007)

● Beginners can imitate without doing plagiarism (it is really important to

explain this difference).

● The illusion of immediate availability of knowledge should be

questioned.

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References● Burke, P. (2012). A social history of knowledge II: from

the encyclopédie to Wikipedia. Cambridge: Polity.

● Hattie, J., Timperley, H. (2007). ”The Power of Feedback”. Review of Educational Research, vol. 77, n. 1: 81-112.

● Hoeres, P. (2015). Hierarchien in der Schwarmintelligenz. Geschichtsvermittlung auf Wikipedia. In: Thomas Wozniak, Jürgen Nemitz, Uwe Rohwedder(Hrsg.): Wikipedia und Geschichtswissenschaft. De Gruyter/Oldenbourg: 15-32.

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References● Lund, A. (2017). Wikipedia, Work and Capitalism. Cham:

Springer International Publishing

● O´Sullivan, D. (2009). Wikipedia: a new community ofpractice? Farnham: Ashgate.

● Serres, M. (2012). Petite Poucette. Paris: Le Pommier.● Tkacz, N. (2015). Wikipedia and the politics of openness.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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