Critical and Feminist Methods: Teaching with Wikipedia

The Wiki Scholars program offers courses to researchers and academics that provide a supportive and productive environment by which participants learn how to effectively contribute to and edit Wikipedia articles. As a scholar, I had never seen myself as someone who had the know-how – or anything significant to add – to Wikipedia; as an educator, I advised students to use Wikipedia as a guide or starting point, but never as an academic source and always with an actively engaged critical eye. In taking this course, the contradiction in these positions became clearer to me: Why was I asking students to engage critically with Wikipedia if I wasn’t contributing anything to the site? And why wasn’t I encouraging students to think of themselves of contributors rather than just critics? The Wiki Scholars course pushed me to clarify my position: Wikipedia is not just for consumption, but I – and young student-scholars – must think of it as participatory, as a means to ensure that histories are written, and to continue to question what an expansive ‘neutral point of view’ can look like.