Wikipedia and Academic Writing

An Interesting Tool to Develop Academic Writing Skills

            In her article, Tardy (2010) reviews the challenges facing students who are beginning to develop their academic writing skills and discusses the advantages of using wikis, particularly Wikipedia, to help them in such process. The author further describes the stages that students should follow to write an article aimed at being published in this popular wiki.  

            Students in higher education usually struggle when they have to work on writing tasks because they are not familiar with the rules and styles of academic discourse. Some of the activities involved in writing academically include doing research, paraphrasing and summarizing, citing sources correctly, developing a sense of audience, and complying with formal genre conventions.

            Wikipedia, a famous web-based space for writing collaboratively, might be a valuable tool that teachers could introduce in their classrooms to help students gain confidence in meeting the above mentioned challenges (Tardy, 2010). To further this objective, the author proposes giving the students an assignment consisting in writing an article which will be published in Wikipedia and will therefore be accessible to the public at large.

            In order to complete such task, the students should follow a number of steps: First, they should examine Wikipedia to understand how the site works and the general guidelines it establishes for contributing articles; then, they should gather information about the topic they would like to write about and make an outline of the information they want to include, paraphrasing phrases in order to avoid plagiarism; the fourth step is writing a draft and this is followed by revising, formatting sources and polishing, publishing being the final step.

            Tardy (2010) concludes that small research projects like this offer students the opportunity to start developing academic writing skills while promoting motivation, since, according to her experience, students seem to be excited about the fact thar their own work might be read by millions of people.

References

Tardy, C. (2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic         Writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27.

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