Page:Physics on Wikipedia - Martin Poulter and Mike Peel - Physics World, 24(09).pdf/4

Feature: and “Magnetosphere of Jupiter”. Articles at this level can appear on the front page of the site as “Today’s Featured Article”. This happened to “Gamma-ray burst” on 18 June 2011. As a result, five million people saw the one-paragraph summary on the front page, and 32 000 of them followed the link to the full article. This shows how, through Wikipedia, scientific ideas and theories can access a readership in one day that pages on many other sites would struggle to reach in a whole year.

1 From worst to best: the stub and the featured article



There are many ways to get involved in improving Wikipedia (see box on p34). Some of the biggest contributions are made not by people writing articles, but by research groups or archives that give permission for collections of images to be reused.

Educational projects

We in the Wikipedia community have set ourselves a truly enormous task: to write high-quality, accessible articles on every area of knowledge. The estimated 100 million person-hours achieved in the first decade are only a start. Meanwhile, educators in schools and universities want to create experiences that encourage critical thinking, collaboration, proper use of sources and other good scholarly habits. Perhaps these problems can solve each other if educators and Wikipedians work together.

That is the thinking behind Wikipedia educational assignments. Students or school classes work with each other and with the Wikipedia community to create or improve articles or specific items such as graphs, timelines or diagrams. The wiki software records their contributions and instructors assess their work. The first university assignments focused on articles about public policy. For example, the extensive article “Nuclear energy policy in the United States” was written by Kasey Baker, a graduate student, in collaboration with Wikipedia volunteers. This opportunity has now been thrown open to all subjects. Thousands of students, at universities on four continents, are now improving Wikipedia for course credits.

Students who are working on undergraduate projects, or are beginning postgraduate work, are the ideal people to benefit. They already have to create neutral, well-sourced reviews of the existing literature, which is just what Wikipedia needs. The site is also an excellent self-study opportunity. For someone who is no longer a student and wants to extend their knowledge, improving a Wikipedia article and submitting it for review is a way to get independent feedback.

The above-mentioned quality scale can be used to guide assessment of students’ work, although a more Physics World