Good move by Wikipedia to help develop tools educators can use. By engaging the academic & teaching community, Wikipedia could actually become a much more substantive and “credible” resource. Plus by engaging educators in the act of editing Wikipedia and using them to introduce Wikipedia to their students as contributors and not just users, I can see these resources expanding the Wikipedia contributor user base as more students and educators become engaged in not only using, but contributing, to Wikipedia.
As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an “open educational resource platform” that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom.
Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning.
“We don’t want them to cite Wikipedia,” he said of students. “What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.”
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