Make Wikipedia Even Better (And Support a Great Cause!)

If you know anything about me by now during my time here at ProfHacker, it’s that I’ll promote and share the heck out of anything Mike Caulfield is doing in order to clean up the internet environment. Seriously, if you are doing ANYTHING related to digital literacy/fluency, you should read his blog. All of it.

His latest project is the #NOW Challenge:

I am announcing a project to get students and faculty to produce 1,000 new Wikipedia articles on significant English-language local newspapers by October 12, 2018. This will represent a substantial increase in Wikipedia coverage of these papers (An increase of 1,000 U.S. papers would be almost a 40% increase in U.S. coverage, for example). Join by doing it and telling me.

The idea is to help readers identify newspapers of record to help filter out fake news sites. It gets better, though:

Donors Paul Haahr and Susan Karp have offered to give $25 per page completed towards the goal to the Room to Read charity, up to a total of $25,000. The amount will be tallied up based purely on pages completed by project participants by December 15, 2018. For example, if we finish 938 pages the amount of the donation will be $23,450. The donation will be in the donors’ names, though we encourage people to note they contributed work toward the challenge on their user page, and to broadcast their participation through blogging, Twitter, and any other suitable means.

So, you and your students can help clean up the digital environment and help a charity. Caulfield has a helpful getting started post (as he always does, because he REALLY wants people to participate). As you plan for your course in the fall, think about ways your could incorporate this into your syllabus!

What digital literacy assignments are you planning for your course?

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash