Academic
literacy skills in Wikipedia writing project – A summary
Garcete Marisol
Ciampichini Carolina
In the
article ‘Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic
Writing’, Tardy (2010) describes the process of composing an article for
the website Wikipedia as an approach to introduce the literacy skills that
students must master in formal academic writing. Among such skills, the author
states “They [students] must conduct research, summarize and paraphrase, cite
sources, adopt genre conventions that meet audience expectations, and select words
and grammatical patterns” (p.12). Not only, does Tardy highlight the fact that
such requirements can represent a challenge to novice writers at the beginning,
but also affirms that classrooms are the main source of knowledge and practice
students can have. Therefore, the article also delineates the steps for
carrying out a Wikipedia writing project.
The
author explains that the origin of the name Wikipedia lies on fact that it is a
wiki in which any person can write about a certain topic and another
person may edit that content. It is the most popular online encyclopedia
with numerous contributors and
administrators who check the content. In order to write an article in
Wikipedia, a contributor does not need previous experience but the
article needs to comply with certain requirements such as: be clear,
supported by reliable sources, footnotes and general references and it
has to follow Wikipedia's guidelines.
Tardy
(2010) lists eight steps in the project she designed to guide
students through the process of composing an article for Wikipedia. The first
step is to examine Wikipedia and understand how it works and the
guidelines it has. Then, students are encouraged to research a
topic which has not been approached in the Wikipedia English version
yet and in the third step they organize that information and create a
detailed outline. Steps four and are devoted to drafting and
revising. After that, students have to format sources and then polish all their
work. Eventually, students publish the article.
The
Wikipedia-writing project introduces students to many skills of academic
research writing in an appealing approach. Almost everyone recognizes
Wikipedia nowadays and a lot of people use it as the main source of information.
Therefore, students obtain a very realistic access to the audience
and enjoy having their work published in a great source of
information.
References
Tardy, C. M. (2010). Writing for the
world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27.
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