Collaborative group work and increased diversity through Wikipedia editing

Abstract

This paper details how a collaborative assignment to edit Wikipedia entries on linguistic topics can help students practice and improve their research skills and navigate group work through an engaged learning task. It describes strategies for group formation, types of cognitive skills that were deployed in the task, equitable distribution of workload and ways that individual student contributions to the project were tracked and assessed, along with project feedback from student reflections. The editing task is also shown as a way to increase gender diversity and widen the language background of the site’s editors.