Wikipedia at the university: Engaging students and teachers in open knowledge and collaborative work

Abstract

In the last decade, Wikipedia has gone from being one of the great enemies of education to becoming a great ally, especially thanks to the degree of rigor and organization it has achieved. The free encyclopedia is increasingly present in universities and offers numerous opportunities for teachers for educational innovation. This paper describes an innovation project promoted by MediaLab USAL at the University of Salamanca and aimed at the generation and publication of open knowledge, at university level, in the open encyclopedia Wikipedia. This project aims to promote the creation of quality content in Spanish at the University, to include the rigorous editing of content in Wikipedia as part of the practical work of undergraduate and postgraduate subjects at the University of Salamanca and to offer a new free learning tool to teachers and students. The initiative has counted with the participation of more than 100 professors, 584 students and has achieved the creation of 1752 articles specialized in different areas of knowledge in Wikipedia.