Inquiry, Critique, and Dissemination of Knowledge: Graduate Students Contributing to Wikipedia

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by awa

The paper examines how graduate students in a Master of Education entry course develop knowledge investigation, critique, and dissemination skills through a Wikipedia assignment. Students locate a course-related page, evaluate strengths and limitations, recommend improvements, and make edits, with attention to literature cited. Drawing on transformative learning theory, it analyzes perspectives students report shifting about their roles in knowledge use and construction. Survey responses also highlight benefits, challenges, and recommendations for refining the task, including ethical and methodological considerations in critical literacy and online collaboration.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

AccessFree to download

Birth of the Wikipedia Assignment

Background Rationale

Critical literacy skills

Methods

4 Inquiry, Critique, and Dissemination of Knowledge: Graduate Students Contributing to Wikipedia Nicola Simmons Brock University Graduate students use existing knowledge and are ultimately expected to add to that knowledge. Students ina Masters of Education entry course were asked to find a Wikipedia page related to the course topics, critique it, and make improvements to it to begin to develop these skills. In this paper, I examine ways in which their perspectives were transformed (Mezirow, 1991) regarding their roles in knowledge use and construction and how they grew as a result. Birth of the Wikipedia Assignment M ike Wesch’s (2007a) video A Vision of Students Today (over 4.8 million viewers) or his more recent (2007b) Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us (over 11.6 million viewers) are exemplars of how knowledge is socially constructed and how widely it can be shared. His keynote at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (STLHE) 2010 annual conference raised important questions about who creates and edits knowledge and caused me to think about how I might help graduate students develop their skills in knowledge investigation, critique, and dissemination. Shortly after that event, I heard faculty ata workshop asserting their assignments were much stronger since they had stopped allowing students to use Wikipedia. I pondered this, wondering how disallowing a particular knowledge source helped students develop habits of scholarly inquiry. Soon after, at a graduate orientation came a reminder from our Department Chair that, in graduate school, students were required todo more than use existing knowledge: they must create new knowledge. This confluence of events caused me to think deeply about how we ask students to interact with knowledge and reflect on their role in that regard. As a result, I gave my students an assignment that required them to locate a course-related Wikipedia page and critique it, discuss its strengths and limitations, provide recommendations for improvement, and make the appropriate edits. The assignment was intended to help students develop their research skills in an introduction to graduate study course and also to prompt a discussion about the use of sources and crossreferencing. In this paper, I outline the transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991) students experienced as a result of this assignment and discuss the paradigm shifts that can result when students engage in knowledge critique and diffusion. Background Rationale Hammett and Collins (2002) note that graduate students expect to “see themselves as producers of knowledge and acknowledged members of an academic community”(p. 439) . While students may be encouraged to publish or present their work, they may have little authentic opportunity to practice these graduate-level skills, particularly if they take a course-based route. Wikipedia provides a platform that allows a student (at any stage) to engage in knowledge critique and publication. As Maehre (2009) outlines, The students enter a turbulent environment where every syllable has tobe defended by people with no authority over anyone else, where no editor has final say. This shows the student that the content of the work is paramount, not the author’s credentials, however imperfect may be the process of shaping that content. (p. 235) Critical literacy skills While content is important, process skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, self-guided inquiry, and appropriate use of resources are essential in this century (Simmons, 2013) and are part of Ontario’s expected graduate outcomes (McMaster University, 2010) . Heil (2005), however, notes that students often take the route that yields the quickest information, foregoing academic journals and scholarly databases in favour of websites such as Wikipedia. O’Sullivan and Scott (2000) found students primarily chose internet resources for reasons of expediency, with only 10% noting lim

FAQs

What was the Wikipedia assignment given to the graduate students?

Students reviewed a course-related Wikipedia page for strengths and potential improvements, especially regarding literature cited, then edited the site based on their recommendations. They also produced an accompanying paper (about 4–6 pages) that connected the edits to scholarly sources and included a printed screen before edits.

What theory framework guides the paper’s analysis?

The paper uses transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1991) to examine how students’ perspectives changed regarding their roles in knowledge use and knowledge construction.

What benefits and challenges did students report in the study?

Through an online survey, nine students described benefits gained from completing the assignment and challenges they experienced. They also responded with recommendations for changing the assignment and reflections on key learning and shifts in how they used Wikipedia and other resources.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by awa