Editorial: Get on the Wiki train

We’re all Wikipedians now. Or at least we will be some day, as we watch Wikipedia.org ascend… We’re all Wikipedians now. Or at least we will be some day, as we watch Wikipedia.org ascend the respect ladder among U.S. academics.

Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation held the first “Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit,” where the organization convened college professors who deliberately use — or intend to use — the publicly edited Web-based encyclopedia as a teaching tool. According to Inside Higher Ed, two dozen universities, including George Washington University and Harvard, now offer courses that require work on Wikipedia as part of the semester grade. This is the result of Wikimedia’s “Public Policy Initiative,” which sought to recruit college faculty and students to the Wikipedia cause, starting with public policy classes. The participants were not paid.

After being verbally whipped by our high school teachers whenever we asked if we could cite Wikipedia.org for our five-paragraph essays, our eyes grew wide with disbelief at this news: Professors are willingly, earnestly collaborating with the providers of Wikipedia.

It’s just remarkable that a webservice so long maligned by academia is now attracting such positive attention. Though one should note that the attention’s not necessarily there because the reliability of the content has increased; rather, it seems certain college faculty are buying into the underlying cause of Wikipedia. And with reflection, that’s not so surprising — the missions of both Wikipedia and institutions of higher education are, in large part, to exchange knowledge with the outside world. Since good professors highly prioritize educating the masses, it’s no wonder they could flock to the opportunity to involve their classes in an effort to touch many more people than a lifetime of intro classes could.

With highly reputed universities now associating themselves with Wikipedia — and the director of the National Archives employing a “Wikipedian in residence,” according to Inside Higher Ed — the site’s gravitas is clearly on the way up. And so being, we think it’s time for college students to adopt a major mindset shift. Instead of treating Wikipedia in the traditional manner — locating the desired factoids and then going on our merry way — we need to start treating it as a public asset, like a local public library, but digital and everywhere. The way we accomplish that shift is to recognize our responsibility to contribute, not in dollars in cents, but by our own knowledge.

If Wikipedia is indeed the backbone around which the sum of human knowledge will be compiled, college students are right for the job of compilation. As the results of the ongoing Public Policy Initiative have indicated, we have resources at our disposal that allow us to make high-quality contributions: Classes that charge a premium to enroll in,  professors with decades of experience and — in Pitt’s case — access to a wealth of scientific journals. And though The Pitt News might be biased, writing about what you’re interested with hopes of educating the masses is far more fun than paying taxes to support a local library.

So, you heard us, stop cruising Facebook and get on Wikipedia.