Wikipedia Education Program/Handout: How to grade Wikipedia assignments

Finding a good way to grade assignments is one of the central challenges reported by instructors who have worked with the Wikipedia Ambassador Program so far. A range of grading rubrics have worked for instructors in the past, including:

Student blogging – regular blog posts throughout the term, based on a short prompt every week or two
Reflective papers – a short paper explaining and reflecting on students' work on Wikipedia, which serves as a lens to evaluate
Portfolio – students collect accounts of their major contributions (with links showing their work), their significant interactions with classmates and the Wikipedia community, and their reflections on the assignment
Presentation (individual or group) – students show the rest of the class what they did and how their articles evolved
Peer reviews – students evaluate each others' work on Wikipedia, leaving reviews for each other on or off the site
Wikipedia quality assessment tools – Wikipedia's system for evaluating article quality can be used to measure progress on students' articles
Size of contribution – grade students on the sheer amount of material they add to Wikipedia, easily calculated using Wikipedia's many automated tools
Article history – compare what an article looked like before and after a student worked on it, using the article history
Student contribution history – Wikipedia keeps a detailed record of every contribution made by each user, and some basic tools are available to make sense of contribution histories

Some selection of these methods is typically used in combination. For example, the following grading rubric has been successful for classes with major Wikipedia assignments:

5% each (x4): Participation grade for early Wikipedia exercises
10%: Participation in Wikipedia discussions in class
10%: Peer reviews and collaboration with classmates
50%: Quality of your main Wikipedia contributions, evaluated in light of your reflective essay
10%: Reflective essay