Education/Newsletter/October 2013/Demystifying Wikipedia at Singapore Management University

Singapore Management University's Li Ka Shing Library hosted "Demystifying Wikipedia: Tips for Information Literacy" on 22nd August 2013. About 50 librarians, educators and researchers from local and overseas institutions participated in this workshop. Wikipedians Mr. Maximilian Klein and Dr. Jack Tsen-Ta Lee spoke at the event and discussed using Wikipedia for information literacy as well as in teaching and learning.

Maximilian Klein presenting on "Information Literacy: Wikipedia Style" at a workshop at the Li Ka Shing Library, Singapore Management University

Max gave a presentation titled "Information Literacy: Wikipedia Style". He took participants through the structure of a Wikipedia article using a short video and showed how to go "under the hood" of an article to its history and talk pages. Participants discovered how to trace the development of an article and its surrounding discussions by editors. The article on Prince George of Cambridge was used to illustrate the points raised.

Participants trying their hand at editing articles and uploading media during the workshop

Jack discussed managing the SMU Constitutional and Administrative Law Wikipedia Project and using Wikipedia as a teaching tool. He shared with participants the logistics of running the project and well as the challenges that he faced, such as running out of topics to assign students. His experience was previously reported here.

After the presentations, both Max and Jack led a hands-on session where participants worked in small groups to edit articles in sandboxes using the new VisualEditor. During the session, participants tried out basics of editing such as inserting links to other articles, creating references, and uploading media content with metadata to the Wikimedia Commons. Issues of copyright and the use of Creative Commons licences were also discussed in the context of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons contributions.