Day 1 of class: When reviewing your syllabus, spend time explaining to students how all activities and assignments, including WP, connect directly to the learning objectives of the course. Emphasize what applicable skills and content knowledge you expect them to gain through the assignments. When talking about WP, remind them that in this exercise, they will be active participants in providing the global public with access to accurate and readable scholarly knowledge. (In other words, their hard work will no longer be stuck in a professor's desk drawer!)
1 week prior to beginning the WP assignment: Have a WP Campus Ambassador introduce your students to the culture, and governance of WP, get them set up with a User Page and a Sandbox, and provide them information on how to access WP assistance. This session should last 30-45 minutes and can be done during your class time or as an outside, mandatory workshop. If you'd like, you can assign students the task of creating their own User Accounts and Sandboxes prior to the session to reduce this session to 25-30 minutes. There are great tip sheets and video tutorials available that can walk students through these two steps if you select to do this as an out-of-class assignment.
1 week prior to beginning the WP assignment: Share your WP grading rubric and all expectations with students. This will ensure they understand the level of work you are expecting from them and help guide them in writing a good WP article. Here are a few things that may help in developing your WP assignment rubric:
The week you begin the WP assignment: Have all students email you their WP User ID. Remind students that IDs are case sensitive and ask them to double-check the accuracy of their email.
1 week prior to WP article draft due date: Have a WP Campus Ambassador host an tech editing party for your students. This should be a 45-60 minute session that can be done during your class time or as an outside, mandatory workshop. During the session, students will learn how to properly format their article, including section headers, links, citations, etc.
Other components to consider when designing courses involving Wikipedia
Will your students work in groups or individually? If in groups, students still need individual User Accounts/Pages, but should work collaboratively on their article in a singular Sandbox.
Will you do article selection ahead of time and allow students to choose from a list, or will you allow them to research WP and select an article? If you will allow students to select their own articles, you should allow proper time for this in your course schedule and vet all articles. For example, you'll want to steer students away from an article if they select one that is significantly developed and has little room for expansion/improvement.
Will you require students to edit existing articles, create new articles, or give them the flexibility of either? Any of these options work, just be sure to allow for proper time in your course schedule for the option you choose. This is very similar to having students do preliminary research to determine a topic for a traditional research paper, except they now have to consider what is already out there (making it more similar to writing a thesis or dissertation, I suppose).
How much interaction do you want students to have with the WP community? If you want students to experience the collaborative part of WP, you'll want to ensure their articles are moved to the live space at least 3 weeks prior to the end of the semester. While this doesn't ensure interaction with the WP community, it provides enough time for potential interaction. If you want guaranteed (and somewhat controlled) interaction, there are ways to make this happen by partnering with WikiProjects and we can help you with this.
