Mad Prime

The other day I was recalling a required course at Caltech, a science communication writing class that is meant to help students learn how to communicate technical ideas. I remember writing for this class (although I can't remember what I wrote about!) and in retrospect I'm saddened to think about how many hours I spent in college writing papers that nobody ever read again. There is a large pool of wasted efforts going into writing papers for college coursework.

It occurred to me that it would be wonderful if this sort of course actually had students choose Wikipedia pages that need attention and completely rewrite them. Writing a scientific/technical wikipedia topic addresses many of the same writing skills that science/engineering students need to learn: the article needs to be accessible as possible while remaining technically accurate, it needs to cover a lot of different pieces of information while maintaining coherence as a whole, and it needs to be well referenced (and, by implication (one hopes), well researched).

It has been pointed out to me that I'm not the first with this idea and that it has been done -- and while they did run into some difficulties it also showed that writing with purpose motivated students to put more effort into their work. I think many of potential pitfalls could be addressed with appropriate foresight. Some concerns are:

• students feeling pressure writing under the spotlight of the public eye
• teachers feeling stressed at having to evaluate whether work is good for Wikipedia rather than focus on helping the student learn to write
• social friction with Wikipedia as students make mistakes in wiki formatting and are unfamiliar with standard protocol

Here is my proposal that I think would address many concerns:

Set up a private mediawiki for the class (or whole school?) into which all papers are written. Students can see each other's papers should they choose, but I don't see that as a problem. Classes require students to show their work to other students all the time, and in this case it's only if they choose to look and they don't have to evaluate each other (unless maybe you want that to be part of the class). Papers are written into this wiki and instructors read them there. You could even have a week or two "free for all" editing period near the end where students can improve each other's articles.

At the end of the course, students can give consent for their work to go onto Wikipedia. It's optional, but they don't have to make the decision until after they're done.

Assign someone a TA position as Wikipedia liason for the group - not a writing expert, instead someone familiar with Wikipedia, like me. (After an iteration or two of this, prior students are likely to be interested in taking this TA position. If that doesn't happen perhaps the course isn't worth continuing.) This person has the following tasks:

1. evaluate the students' initial choices for topics to write on - check that the target article is poor quality and deserves some rewriting work
2. once these are chosen, give notice on the Wikipedia talk pages the possibility of a page rewrite in the next few months.
3. At the end of the course, for those students who give consent to pushing the work to Wikipedia, evaluate whether their versions are an improvement on the article. If there are sections of the article that were lost and should have be preserved, communicate with the students to integrate those into their work. If there are wiki style problems they can tell the students what to correct. Give notice on these pages about imminent rewrite. If there are wiki style problems they can tell the students what to correct.
4. The liason can also communicate with relevant Wikiprojects if they doubt their own qualifications for determining the factual accuracy of the rewrite.
5. Update the pages with the rewrites.

This can be a custom Wikipedia account eg. "MIT Wikipedia Liason".

This way instructors can focus on improving the writing and not worry about evaluating whether it's good enough to integrate. Students won't be pressured to make their work public, it only happens if they decide to do so. The liason makes sure the transition of material into Wikipedia goes smoothly.

Writing a wikipedia article could be an option within a course rather than a requirement (ie. an alternative to standard dead tree paper writing) and this set-up could accommodate multiple instructors and courses should multiple people be interested in offering this style of writing as an option.

Genetics was on the front page of Wikipedia yesterday as Featured Article of the Day! This was pretty cool, but this of course attracted a crop of editors and comments that wanted to improve on the article -- some wonderful and knowledgeable, some newbies, some with an ax to grind.

The one that really got to me was the guy who got really upset with usage of the passive voice:

"With all due respect, I find the drenching of this article in passive voice to be sophomoric and cumbersome. I intend to re-edit the entire article and make it readable to a literate audience, as I believe that Wikipedia articles should be written in a dynamic manner. Should you chose to remove all of my edits, I will seek redress."

My reply:

"Please don't get too passive aggressive with me: [1]." .... "I was concerned that your attempt to remove the passive voice made the article harder to read by introducing unnecessary vocabulary. If you can do it in a cleaner manner then you are welcome to it." .... "While it is hardly arduous for me to comprehend your verbiage, I would importune you to contemplate first the lucidity of your emendations before foisting them upon a somewhat less literate audience."

That link I made there is worth reading, it's to a Language Log post "Passive Aggression" that illustrates the fallacy of an absolute injunction against the passive voice.

And so I tend to ignore the injunction, although I do appreciate that it can generally improve readability. But if removing the passive voice from a sentence requires introducing more complicated vocabulary, I think it is actually reducing the clarity of the sentence. Some examples of changes this editor made...

• "For genes that are closer together" was replaced with "For genes located in closer proximity"
• "DNA (rather than protein) was the genetic material of the viruses" was replaced with "DNA (rather than protein) comprised the genetic material of the viruses"
• "A popular theory during Mendel's time was the concept of blending inheritance" was replaced with "A popular theory during Mendel's time pertained to the concept of blending inheritance" (the theory was only related to the concept? This one isn't even correct. I'm not even sure it's passive??)

I'm really not a writing expert, but I think the article needs to be as accessible as possible -- in these cases, the passive voice is preferable to doing some grammatical backflips over fancy vocabulary. Make sure to read that Language Log post, it's very funny!