Wikipedia and information literacy in schools

In today’s ‘attention economy’, time is precious. Yet many educators still encourage deep, critical engagement with online information. This strategy is too time-consuming. Instead, students should be taught the means to quickly assess which claims are worth paying attention to. Challenging negative perceptions of Wikipedia’s reliability in the teaching community, we trial using Wikipedia as a fact-checking tool in three primary and middle ACT school. We present findings of how teachers and students reacted to these lesson plans

Rachel Cunneen is Senior Lecturer in English and Literacy Education, and Deputy Program Director of Secondary Studies in UC’s Faculty of Education.

Mathieu O’Neil is Associate Professor of Communication at UC’s News and Media Research Centre, where he leads the Critical Conversations Lab, and Honorary Associate Professor of Sociology at the ANU. He researches the digital commons, information literacy, and the trajectories of issues in the online environment. He was a founding member of the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab at the ANU in 2006. He founded the Journal of Peer Production in 2011 and the Digital Commons Policy Council in 2021.

Addressing Wikipedia’s content gaps

Only 19% of Wikipedia’s biographies are of women. Coverage of other historically excluded populations is even worse. And as the climate crisis speeds up, scientific information on Wikipedia quickly becomes outdated. Wiki Education addresses English Wikipedia's content gaps on key topics at scale by working within academic and cultural institutions, guiding those who are already doing this scholarship to use Wikipedia as their platform. In this introductory keynote, LiAnna Davis will discuss some Wiki Education programs in the US/Canada. And in her capacity as chair of the global Wikipedia & Education User Group, she will also share her perspective on global opportunities.

LiAnna Davis is the Chief Programs Officer and Deputy Director for Wiki Education. With more than twelve years' experience in running programs connecting Wikipedia and academia, LiAnna is one of the world's leading experts in teaching with Wikipedia. LiAnna has played a pivotal role in creating Wikipedia education programs in eight countries worldwide and supported the work of volunteers in more than 50 additional countries.

Getting structured data about anything and everything

Each language version of Wikipedia represents each topic with blocks of written text. A lesser-known aspect of the Wikimedia system is an even more massive, multilingual, open, ontologically flexible, and editable database, ‘Wikidata’, that links all of these topics together in a huge network of structured knowledge. In this presentation I will show that it is fairly easy to get whatever data sets you need. I'll also demonstrate a browser tool which shows you a layer of metadata as you browse, to enhance your information density and fact-checking ability.

Wikimedia and the evidence ecosystem

Wikimedia platforms rely on credible citations and sources, which are based on a complex knowledge and media economy involving diverse genres, formats, publishers and institutions and the codes of verification and credibility that they use. This talk will provide a critical overview of the diverse evidence ecosystem which underpins Wikimedia citations.

Dr Amanda Lawrence is a researcher and librarian specialising in open knowledge, research communication and public knowledge infrastructure. She is currently Research Fellow, Open Knowledge Systems at RMIT University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and also Wikimedian in Residence at the Centre. Her previous roles include Director of Analysis & Policy Observatory (apo.org.au), and Literature Program Manager at the Asialink Centre, University of Melbourne. Amanda is a member of Wikimedia Australia and currently President of the WMAU Board.

Using Wikipedia in Class

Using Wikipedia as a class activity has been shown to "cultivate critical thinking and digital literacy skills, develop specialist expertise, and contribute to the social good" (Mayhew, 2019). This presentation shares feedback from educators who have incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, and outlines ways in which Wikimedia Australia can support educators to add Wikipedia to their pedagogical toolkit.

Pru Mitchell has been involved in the Australian chapter of Wikimedia since its inception. She is an educator and librarian, working as Manager of Information Services at the Australian Council for Educational Research, and is an adjunct in information studies at Charles Sturt University.

Using Wikiversity for teaching and learning

Wikiversity is less well-known than its popular sister, Wikipedia, but is part of the same ecosystem of wiki projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Whilst Wikipedia allows people to develop encyclopaedic information, Wikiversity is for teaching, learning, and research. Thus, Wikiversity offers provides a "perfect" platform for open academic practices. Teachers, students, and researchers can build, discuss, share, and collaborate on open educational resources and related learning projects. By participating in Wikiversity learning communities, academics and students can develop collaborative online writing and discussion skills, and come to appreciate the value of openness and transparency in knowledge development.

James Neill is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Canberra. He is an advocate of open academia including the development and sharing of open educational resources via the Wikimedia Foundation wiki projects. James is a custodian and bureaucrat on English Wikiversity where he has supported over 1000 psychology students to create new content about motivation and emotion topics.

Wikipedia as a key research outreach and teaching platform

Wikipedia touches all areas of university life. For researchers trying to reach people outside of their sub-field, it is the most effective option available for academic outreach – being read by a huge and diverse demographic (think practitioners, policymakers, journalists, grant reviewers). As well as being directly used by students, its transparency and auditability also make it a perfect platform to teach transferable digital literacy skills. This session will introduce some of the key ways in which Wikipedia works in an academic context, and how collaborations with the academic ecosystem are improving the encyclopedia’s coverage of complex topics.

Dr Thomas Shafee is a data scientist and evolutionary biochemist with a background in research, consulting and research support. He is also a keen contributor to Wikipedia, focusing on improving diagrams and citations for scientific topics. He organises Wikipedia-Academia integration as an editor for PLOS Genetics and the WikiJournal publishing group.