Etherfire

Bio

Hi, etherfire is the wikipedia alias for Joshua DiCaglio, a professor who has been teaching an assignment on Wikipedia editing since 2017. The project has grown in scope as the problem of what I call "stalled wikipedia articles" becomes more important and glaring the more I run this project. More to come soon about this project (as well as some older reflections below).

Editing wikipedia has been a primarily pedagogical project for me, albeit one that has grown in scope and become a whole project on its own. My major line of research is on the rhetoric and philosophy of science, including a book I wrote about scale.

As long as I keep teaching writing and editing, I'll keep teaching this assignment. If you'd like to know more about stalled articles and the assignment I built around them, I will soon be making these materials available publicly.

Teaching with Wikipedia

After some of the experiences I'll continue to document below, I decided to craft an assignment for my Technical Editing course, designed specifically to work with the editing constraints and culture of wikipedia. I'll document some of my reasons for doing so here as well as provide some links to students who have really gotten into the project.

For this first iteration of the assignment, I have forgone the course page structure because much of what I am having the students do is learn to read editorial culture and conventions. So we're having whole class periods devoted to wikipedia conventions (e.g. WP:NOT or WP:NPOV). And we're talking a lot about what it looks like to come into the middle of an editorial conversation and help out rather than necessarily taking charge. So my hope is that this will avoid many of the reasons to form course pages. Plus, since my students are editing existing pages rather than creating new ones, I hope to avoid many of the problems I know other instructors have run into with these kinds of assignments (as is covered in Wikipedia: Student assignments). We're also talking a lot about what to do as others continue to edit. I wanted to avoid claiming and altering the editorial flow. Of course, many of my students posts have done this regardless with the quality of their editor interaction but others have been much more diplomatic about it, actually getting into the spirit of editing rather than just completing tasks. I'm curious to know if anyone has done this kind of editor-oriented assignment before (to your knowledge) or if you can direct me to any additional discussions on the matter.

The grading of the assignment is designed around facilitating the continuing editorial project of Wikipedia, not just the product out the other end. While I can check how much they improved the article, I can't expect the final thing to be "finished" in some publishing sense because Wikipedia is inherently an on-going project. What I can do, however, is see how much the students learned to read the editorial situation. I think of editing as primarily a task of learning to see what other writers do not, whether you're talking about grammatical nuances or problems with Neutral Point of View. But in this case of this assignment, things like Neutral Point of View become central to the editorial endeavor.

In other words, I don't want to force my students to contribute to wikipedia, nor do I want to train them to write for it. Instead, I want to train them to be nuanced editors who can read the editorial conventions, needs, and situation with detail, precision, and a good dose of friendliness. Chances are some will keep editing wikipedia but armed with an awareness of what is required for this project to continue to be of high quality.

In 2020, my assignment was featured on the WikiEdu blog.