Htw3

My name is Howard T. Welser, aka Ted Welser. I am Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio University. I teach introduction to sociology, undergraduate research methods, a course on group processes, data analysis, a capstone course on social media, networks and change, and graduate level course in research and study design.

Across all of my courses I like to encourage reflection on how technological development contributed to social change, often in unexpected ways. One important change is in the nature of education and scholarship, hence I have often encouraged students to use and contribute to Wikipedia. My focus in Wikipedia is facilitating the improvement of articles involving concepts central to sociology, many of which are found in the Sociology WikiProject.

My interest in Wikipedia is substantive as well. I am currently involved in several research projects that study the development of roles in a variety of online settings, including Wikipedia. My research, teaching and writing interests focus on how micro-level processes generate collective outcomes. I am especially interested in status achievement in avocations, development of institutions and social roles, the emergence of cooperation, and network structure in computer mediated interaction.

You can contact me through Wikipedia, or, more predictably, follow my OU link or my google profile.

My current editing projects in Wikipedia include making incremental improvements here and there on sociological topics, and also my home town Athens, Ohio, which still needs lots of work.

Course Related Projects

In the past, student teams from my courses have improved existing articles in the Sociology WikiProject, and have added pages on topics that are similarly basic to the discipline.

Currently I concentrate on encouraging more advanced students to make small helpful additions to articles in the wikiproject sociology cleanup list.

I have two pedagogical goals when it comes to Wikipedia. First, I seek to encourage wider awareness of Wikipedia as a context where ordinary people can make small or sometimes extraordinary contributions. In theory, students know that anyone can contribute, but in practice I find that fewer than 10% of my students have ever made an edit to Wikipedia. Furthermore, few if any have any understanding of the community processes that go on behind the scenes of Wikipedia where ordinary contributors work together to make a great resource. I students to edits of the actual Wikipedia (through a version of our syllabus and some other course related pages), and we integrate discussion or roles and research on Wikipedia. My intent is to break down a barrier that seems to exist between most students and the notion of contributing to large scale collaborative projects in general, and Wikipedia in particular.

My second pedagogical goal arises when students have reason to begin projects where they make substantial edits to existing pages. The intent behind these projects is to involve students in the creative, social process of communicating sociological ideas to others. I also want students to become more familiar with the changing terrain of the online world. Why not contribute to, and learn about the emergent systems for collaborative work? In addition to broadening online horizons, the Wikipedia projects have the practical goal of improving the often incomplete and under researched sociology related articles with an emphasis on discussing the relevant research on that topic.

Building on the fine advice for aspiring Wikipedia editors in general, I offer some advice for students of sociology who want to develop and improve sociology articles. Our earliest class team projects are briefly described on Wikipedia:School and university projects#Ohio University.

Developing Sociology Articles

1. Develop an interest in a social phenomenon. Almost all things social have been studied in sociology, economics, social psychology, communication, political science and geography. If something piques your interest, then you are set to start a research project. It is helpful to talk to some friends and colleagues about what interests you. Explaining your interests to others is a great way to 'learn for yourself' what it is that interests you.
2. Discover the lay of the land. Check for relevant entries in Wikipedia.en and other languages. Many topics have already been raised, and there are likely several relevant pages. Frequently, your chosen topic will either be a stub, or a subsection of an underdeveloped article. Start with what has been done. Make a list of all the urls in Wikipedia pages that are relevant to your topic, and post these on your user page. That way, they are right there when you need to put some context links into your new article.
3. Cultivate expertise that builds on your interests. Developing a single article in Wikipedia (by yourself or with a team) implies that the authors know more of what has been learned about a topic than most folks. The way to cultivate this expertise is through a literature review of the published peer-reviewed research on that topic in the relevant disciplines. The Wikipeida "how to develop an article" page has good resources/explanations for this step. Read that, then read my additional suggestions in 4. below.
4. Find overviews. Textbooks and Annual Review articles are great places to find chapter length overviews of a given area of research. Depending on the scope of your topic, you could be looking for subsections of such publications or a series of articles or chapters to get a good overview of your topic. Suppose that you find two high quality summary articles on your topic. The article you are aiming to write will be less than 10% of the length of the original research summaries you identified. So your tasks are: understanding, distillation, and selection.
5. Understanding requires some serious reading. Reading for understanding takes time and effort. Expect to read those two 25-30 page articles at least twice, likely more times if you do not have extensive background in related topics. Many people find it helpful to print copies of their readings and take them offline, ideally to a quite, reflective, well-caffeinated spot. Take notes on what you read. Be able to explain the main points of the articles in your own words, perhaps over a beer with a friend. Doing so should give you the general understanding necessary to begin a reasonable outline of your topic.
6. Type up an annotated outline. Your outline should include, at minimum, sections for an introduction, 3-4 body sections, current research, relevant links, and references. Each section of text should, at minimum, include 3-4 original sentences. This minimally annotated outline will provide a framework for you and other editors to build a fully developed article. Doing so will require collecting further readings on the specific sections .
7. Collecting further readings. The bibliography of your review article is a great place to start for further readings. More currently, you can find articles that cite important articles in the field. Both Google Scholar and the Web of Knowledge facilitate this sort of citation path following. Syllabi from high quality graduate programs provide another great place to look for more in-depth treatments of research topics. Make incremental edits based on new insights from these readings. Flesh out the reference and further readings sections.
8. Spend time reading and synthesizing. Remember that high quality encyclopedia articles on social science topics require a great deal of background reading. The intellectual contribution of the article is not new creation. Instead it is prudent, insightful synthesis of existing knowledge from a research field. Your most important progress on such an article will take place away from the computer screen.