ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, a citizen science movement has tried
to engage students, laymen and other non-scientists in the
production of science. However, there has been less attention
in citizen science projects to use the public to disseminate
scientific knowledge. Wikipedia provides a platform to
study engagement of citizen scientists in knowledge dissemination.
College and university students are especially appropriate
members of the public to write science articles, because
of the course-work and mentorship they receive from faculty.
This paper describes a project to support students’ writing of
scientific articles in Wikipedia. In collaboration with a scientific
association, we involved 640 students from 36 courses
in editing scientific articles on Wikipedia. This paper provides
details in the design of the program and our quantitative
and qualitative approaches to evaluating it. Our results
show that the Wikipedia classroom experiment benefits both
the Wikipedia community and students. Undergraduate and
graduate students substantially improved the scientific content
of over 800 articles, at a level of quality indistinguishable
from content written by PhD experts. Both students and faculty
endorsed the motivational benefits of an authentic writing
experience that would be read by thousands of people.