How to introduce academic writing with an article for Wikipedia: a summary of Tardy (2010)

How to introduce academic writing with an article for Wikipedia: a summary of Tardy (2010)

Acquiring the necessary skills to write academic papers can be a challenging task for ESL students. Tardy (2010) contributes to this field as she explores the use of the collaborative online encyclopaedia Wikipedia in her article “Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing." 

The author highlights that Wikipedia is a web page where students can approach the main aspects of academic writing, such as “research, citations and generic conventions, and style” (para. 7). Furthermore, since published articles should have a number of legitimate sources, students have to cite them appropriately, after having assessed their reliability.

Considering these benefits of using Wikipedia, the author presents an activity which aims at producing an original article for the English edition, and she describes its steps and procedure. Students will begin by analysing the website and some articles and learning to edit pages with list of questions provided by the teacher. The difference between writing for Wikipedia and writing academic texts should be explored in class as well.

For the following step, learners should select a topic that has not been yet included and collect information about it from credible sources. Tardy (2010) suggests identifying each source with a letter. Students will then proceed to write an outline for their article, and paraphrase the information obtained. With these elements, they will produce the first draft, which should be a “clear and coherent text” (para. 20).

In the next stage, students will revise one another's drafts and provide feedback, and edit their work. After this, they will format the sources using the Wikipedia documentation style, and apply the proper format to the in-text citations. Having previously labelled the source will be particularly useful for this. The final revision of the article will involve, apart from an assessment of the language and the organization of the text, the identification of wikilinks.

The last part of the activity involves submission for publication, which may result in an immediate acceptance or a request for revisions. According to a student quoted by Tardy (2010), who believes that his “skills of audience awareness, analysis, support, writing processes and conventional forms were reviewed again and again” (para. 29), the latter is not necessarily a negative outcome.

To conclude, writing an article for Wikipedia is a very useful introduction to English for academic purposes. The most relevant benefit is the fact that many aspects of writing are explored in this process, and this can be seen in the task designed by Tardy (2010).

References

Tardy, Christine (2010), Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum. Retrieved from http://exchanges.state.gov/englishteaching/forum/archives/docs/10-48-1-c.pdf