Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has grown, evolved and been widely studied. Zachary McDowell and Matthew Vetter focus on information literacy and Wikipedia-based pedagogy in “Wikipedia as Open Educational Practice: Experiential Learning, Critical Information Literacy, and Social Justice,” an article published open access in Social Media & Society. Specifically, they use the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education as a metacognition and metaliteracy tool to examine social justice in the pedagogical practice of teaching with Wikipedia.
The authors interlace the six common stages of learning to contribute to Wikipedia – Learning to evaluate the article; Selecting an article to contribute to; Researching the topic; Annotating and summarizing the research; Drafting the article; Editing and responding to feedback – with the six frames of information literacy – Authority Is Constructed and Contextual; Information Creation as a Process; Information Has Value; Research as Inquiry; Scholarship as Conversation; Searching as Strategic Exploration. Through the process of contributing to Wikipedia, some of what students learn concerns:
- becoming authoritative voices themselves and the associated responsibilities;
- that information has value as a commodity, a means of influence and a way of making sense of the world;
- copyright, intellectual property, plagiarism and licensing;
- what Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy means for representing a range of secondary sources without prioritizing one over another;
- how information is constructed from other sources; and
- how to participate in diversifying the world’s information landscape.
Wikipedia authoring and editing teaches people to engage critically with social, political and economic issues, and the skills learned empower people from minority groups to create authoritative sources to counter misinformation that has been directed at them. Authors from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities have an opportunity to meaningfully engage with audiences and to address gaps in information about topics of interest to them. While working with Wikipedia has a learning curve and gatekeeping issues of its own, McDowell and Vetter encourage investigators, students and educators to find mentors or newbies, depending on their alignment, to support each other to “…utilize Wikipedia to engage, learn, and promote these broad issues of social justice. One edit at a time.”
